| Reference | Miles (mi) | Meters (m) |
|---|---|---|
| A sheet of A4 paper (long side) | 0.000184547 mi | 0.297 m |
| Average adult human height | 0.00105633 mi | 1.7 m |
| A football pitch (length) | 0.065244 mi | 105 m |
| A marathon | 26.2188 mi | 42195 m |
| Height of Mount Everest | 5.49851 mi | 8849 m |
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.
The metre is the base unit of length in the International System of Units, written m. Every other SI length unit is defined as a multiple or fraction of it, and units of area, volume, speed and many others are built from it in turn.
Its definition has been revised four times, each revision replacing a physical object with something more reproducible. The French Academy of Sciences proposed in 1791 that the metre should be one ten-millionth of the distance from the North Pole to the equator along the meridian through Paris. Surveying that arc took six years and produced a small error, since the Earth is not a perfect sphere. In 1889 the definition moved to a platinum-iridium bar held at Sèvres, near Paris, with copies distributed to signatory nations. In 1960 it was redefined as 1,650,763.73 wavelengths of orange-red light emitted by krypton-86.
The current definition dates from 1983 and is unusual in that it fixes a different quantity. The speed of light in vacuum is defined as exactly 299,792,458 metres per second, and the metre follows as the distance light travels in 1/299,792,458 of a second. Light speed is therefore no longer measured; it is a defined constant, and improvements in measurement now refine the metre rather than the speed.
The unit is used worldwide for building dimensions, athletics tracks, swimming pools, water depth, fabric and rope. Only a small number of countries retain imperial units for general purposes, and even there the metre dominates science and medicine.
Everyday reference points help fix the scale. A standard interior door is roughly two metres tall. A single stride for an adult is close to three quarters of a metre, which is why pacing is a workable rough measure of distance. The width of a single traffic lane is between three and three and a half metres in most countries.
One metre equals 100 centimetres, 1000 millimetres, or 0.001 kilometres. It is approximately 3.28084 feet, or 39.3701 inches.