Other forms: mileages
Mileage is the distance a vehicle has travelled, measured in miles — a car with low mileage, the mileage on the clock. It is also the distance a car covers per unit of fuel, which is what fuel mileage means.
It has a useful figurative sense: mileage means the benefit or use you can get out of something. There is not much mileage in that argument, we got plenty of mileage out of one photograph. That use is informal and common in journalism and business. Note that mileage is used even where distances are measured in kilometres, because no one has produced a word for kilometreage that anybody will say. Spelled mileage, and mileage is one of the few English words where the e survives before -age.
1nountravelledThe distance a vehicle has travelled.
“Low mileage for a car that age.”
synonyms: distance
2nounmileageThe distance a vehicle covers on a given amount of fuel.
“The mileage is better on a long run than in town.”
3nounusefulnessThe usefulness or advantage to be had from something.
“There is not much mileage in complaining now.”
mileage is a measure of distance or usefulness.
Proto-Indo-European
*sem-
Latin
mīlia
Proto-West Germanic
*mīliju
Old English
mīl
Middle English
myle
English
mile
English, today
mileage
Built from
From mile + -age. mile comes 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