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ENGLISH · A WORD WITH POSSIBILITIES

mile.

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.

4 characters2 syllables approx.English language

Meaning & usage

noun/maɪ̯l/UK, US[maɪ̯ɫ]UK, US/maɪ.əl/
  1. 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.
  2. 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.

  3. Any of many customary units of length derived from the Roman mile (mille passus) of 8 stades or 5,000 Roman feet.

  4. The Scandinavian mile: a unit of length precisely equal to 10 kilometers defined in 1889.

  5. Any of many customary units of length from other measurement systems of roughly similar values, as the Chinese mile or Arabic mile.

  6. An airline mile in a frequent flyer program.

  7. Any similarly large distance.

    informal
    The shot missed by a mile.
    My legs felt stiff and leaden from miles of walking.
  8. 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.
  9. One mile per hour, as a measure of speed.

    colloquial
    five miles over the speed limit
  10. A prominent road or street, often roughly a mile long.

    The Royal Mile in Edinburgh. The Millennium Mile (London). Magnificent Mile (Chicago).
    I'm staying near millionaire's mile.
Where this word comes 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”)).

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Definitions, grammatical labels, IPA, etymology and examples: Wiktionary contributors, extracted by Kaikki / Wiktextract. Adapted under CC BY-SA 4.0. Selected fields and authored examples are shown; third-party quotations and audio are omitted. See contributor history.

Last enriched 2026-09-10. Definitions are in English. Romanizations are shown when supplied by the source; syllable estimates are omitted for unsupported scripts.