mile
noun
- unit of length
Wiktionary
Pronunciation: /maɪ̯l/ / [maɪ̯ɫ]
name
Etymology: From the Hanyu Pinyin romanization of the Mandarin 彌勒 /弥勒 (Mílè).
- A county-level city of Honghe prefecture, Yunnan, China.
noun
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”)).
- 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.
“Turn left in 1.2 miles.”
“You need to go about three mile down the road.”
- 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.
“Athelstan Arundel walked home all the way, foaming and raging. No omnibus, cab, or conveyance ever built could contain a young man in such a rage. His mother lived at Pembridge Square, which is four good measured miles from Lincoln's Inn.”
“Ivor had acquired more than a mile of fishing rights with the house ; he was not at all a good fisherman, but one must do something ; one generally, however, banged a ball with a squash-racket against a wall.”
- Any of many customary units of length derived from the Roman mile (mille passus) of 8 stades or 5,000 Roman feet.
- The Scandinavian mile: a unit of length precisely equal to 10 kilometers defined in 1889.
- Any of many customary units of length from other measurement systems of roughly similar values, as the Chinese mile or Arabic mile.
- An airline mile in a frequent flyer program.
- Any similarly large distance.
“The shot missed by a mile.”
“My legs felt stiff and leaden from miles of walking.”
- A race of 1 mile's length; a race of around 1 mile's length (usually 1500 or 1600 meters)
“The runners competed in the mile.”
- One mile per hour, as a measure of speed.
“five miles over the speed limit”