Conversion from Furlongs to Miles

Information about the Furlong (fur)

The furlong is a unit of length equal to 220 yards, 660 feet, or exactly 201.168 metres. It is one eighth of a mile and ten chains.

The name is a contraction of the Old English furh lang, meaning furrow long, and describes the distance a team of oxen could plough before needing rest. That practical origin fixed the length of a medieval strip field, and the furlong therefore predates the mile's English definition. When the Roman mile of 5000 feet was reconciled with English land measurement, the mile was lengthened to 5280 feet so that it would contain a whole number of furlongs. The awkward figure that generations of schoolchildren have memorised is a direct consequence of preserving the older agricultural unit.

Horse racing is where the furlong remains in active daily use. Race distances in Britain, Ireland, the United States and much of the racing world are stated in miles and furlongs, so a race described as one mile two furlongs covers 2010 metres. Sectional times are recorded furlong by furlong, and commentary is built around the unit. Distance markers along the rail count down the remaining furlongs to the finish.

The furlong's relationship to area explains its persistence in older records. An acre was originally defined as one furlong long by one chain wide, the area a team could plough in a day. This is why an acre is a long thin rectangle rather than a square, and why its modern value of 43,560 square feet looks arbitrary.

Outside racing the unit is largely archaic, though it appears in some historical land deeds and in the occasional legal description. Computing folklore keeps it alive in the furlong per fortnight, a deliberately absurd unit of speed used to make a point about dimensional analysis.

It is the reason the acre has the shape it does. An acre was defined as one furlong long by one chain wide, 220 yards by 22, and that long thin rectangle is exactly what a team of oxen could plough in a day without turning more often than necessary. The proportion of ten to one is preserved in the ridge and furrow patterns still visible from the air across the English Midlands, and in field boundaries that have outlasted every plough that made them. The furlong therefore survives less as a measurement than as a shape written into the landscape.

One furlong equals 220 yards, 10 chains, one eighth of a mile, or 201.168 metres.

Information about the Mile (mi)

The mile is a unit of length equal to 5280 feet, 1760 yards, or exactly 1609.344 metres. The symbol is mi. It is the principal unit of road distance in the United States and the United Kingdom.

Its name comes from the Roman mille passus, a thousand paces, where a pace counted two steps. That unit measured about 1479 metres, appreciably shorter than the modern mile. The English mile grew to its present length because it was reconciled with the furlong, an older agricultural measure. Making the mile eight furlongs required 5280 feet, and Parliament fixed that figure by statute in 1593, which is why the unit is sometimes called the statute mile to distinguish it from other historical miles.

Those alternatives were numerous. The Scots mile, the Irish mile and various German and Scandinavian miles all differed, some substantially. The Swedish mil, still used colloquially, is ten kilometres.

Road signs, speed limits and vehicle odometers use the mile in the United States, the United Kingdom, Liberia and Myanmar, and speeds are given in miles per hour. The United Kingdom's position is inconsistent by design: distances and speeds are imperial while most other official measurement is metric, an arrangement that has survived repeated proposals for change.

Athletics keeps the mile as the one non-metric distance with continuing international standing. World records are ratified over the mile alongside metric distances, largely because of the historical weight of the four-minute barrier broken by Roger Bannister in 1954. The current record stands under 3 minutes 44 seconds.

Fuel economy in the United States is expressed as miles per gallon, and aviation and shipping use the separate nautical mile, which is longer at 1852 metres and unrelated in derivation.

The map of the United States is drawn on it. The Public Land Survey, begun in 1785, divided the western territories into townships six miles square, each containing thirty-six sections of one square mile, and each section of 640 acres subdividing neatly into quarters and quarter-quarters. Roads followed the section lines, which is why so much of the American Midwest is a grid of straight routes one mile apart, and why farms there are described in quarter sections rather than in acres. Anyone flying over Iowa or Kansas is looking at the mile drawn across an entire landscape, two centuries after the surveyors laid it out.

One mile equals 1760 yards, 5280 feet, 8 furlongs, or 1609.344 metres. A five-kilometre race is about 3.107 miles.