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mile

Pronunciation: /maɪ̯l/

The English word “mile” has 10 meanings listed here.

noun

  1. The international mile: a unit of length precisely equal to 1.609344 kilometers established by treaty among Anglophone nations in 1959, divided into 5,280 feet or 1,760 yards.
  2. Any of several customary units of length derived from the 1593 English statute mile of 8 furlongs, equivalent to 5,280 feet or 1,760 yards of various precise values.
  3. Any of many customary units of length derived from the Roman mile (mille passus) of 8 stades or 5,000 Roman feet.
  4. The Scandinavian mile: a unit of length precisely equal to 10 kilometers defined in 1889.
  5. Any of many customary units of length from other measurement systems of roughly similar values, as the Chinese mile or Arabic mile.
  6. An airline mile in a frequent flyer program.
  7. Any similarly large distance.
  8. A race of 1 mile's length; a race of around 1 mile's length (usually 1500 or 1600 meters)
  9. One mile per hour, as a measure of speed.
  10. A prominent road or street, often roughly a mile long.

Etymology

From Middle English myle, mile, from Old English mīl, from Proto-West Germanic *mīliju, a borrowing of Latin mīlia, mīllia, plural of mīle, mīlle (“mile”) (literally ‘thousand’ but used as a short form of mīlle passūs (“a thousand paces”)).

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Definitions are from Wiktionary, extracted by Kaikki.org, and are available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.