Other forms: miles
A mile is a distance a little over one and a half kilometres — 1,609 metres, to be exact. Road signs in Britain and America count in miles, the school run is two miles each way, and a runner's mile is four laps of the track.
Britain went metric for almost everything except the road, so you buy petrol in litres and then drive thirty miles on it. Miles per hour is the speed limit; miles per gallon is what the car does. Loosely, miles just means a long way or a big margin: the shop is miles away, this one is miles better, I could see it coming a mile off. A nautical mile is longer, 1,852 metres, and is the one used at sea and in the air. The phrases pull real weight — go the extra mile, miss by a mile, give him an inch and he will take a mile.
1nounmileA unit of distance equal to about 1.6 kilometres.~96%
“The village is three miles from the coast.”
2noungreatA great distance or a wide margin.~2%
“Her handwriting is miles better than mine.”
3nounnauticalA nautical mile, 1,852 metres, used at sea and in the air.~2%
“The ship was forty miles off the coast when the storm hit.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 18 sentences found in the wild and placed 18 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
mile is a unit of distance.
The mile is a thousand. Latin mīlle passūs meant a thousand paces, shortened to mīlle, the thousand itself, and the plural mīlia was borrowed early into Germanic and came down to Old English as mīl. Every road sign is quietly counting Roman paces.
Proto-Indo-European
*sem-
Latin
mīlia
Proto-West Germanic
*mīliju
Old English
mīl
Middle English
myle
English, today
mile
Built from
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”)).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA