Mile (pronounced mahyl)
(1) A unit
of a unit of distance on land, derived from the 1593 English statute mile (equal
to 8 furlongs) and still in use in some English-speaking countries. In 1959, in a treaty established by a number
of Anglophone nations (and subsequently ratified by most), it was defined as
distance equal to 5,280 feet (1,760 yards; 1.609.344 metres).
(2) Any of
many customary units of length derived from the Roman mile (mille passus) of 8 stades (5,000 Roman feet).
(3) Any of a
variety of other units of distance or length, used at different times in different
countries.
(4) In
athletics and horse racing (as “the mile”), a race run over that distance.
(5) In
idiomatic use (in both the singular and plural), a notable distance or margin.
(6) As “air
miles”, a unit in an airline’s frequent flyer program.
Pre 1000:
From the Middle English myle & mile, from the Old English mīl, from the Proto-West Germanic mīliju, from the Latin mīlia & mīllia (plural of mīle
& mīlle (mile)) which translates
literally as “thousand” but was a commonly used short-form of mīlle passus (a thousand paces), thus
the derived mīlia passuum (thousands
of steps), duo milia passuum (two
thousand paces (ie “two miles’) etc).
The origin of the Latin word is unknown and was the source also of the French
mille, the Italian miglio and the Spanish milla whereas the Scandinavian forms (the
Old Norse mila etc) came from English. The West Germanic word was the source also of
the Middle Dutch mile, the Dutch mijl, the Old High German mila and the German Meile. The spelling of the
German forms came about because the Latin milia
(a neuter plural) was mistakenly thought a feminine singular. Mile & mileage are nouns and miles is an
adverb; the noun plural is miles.
The noun mileage
(which appeared also as milage and
although the “mute e” rule would suggest this was correct it never caught on) was
in use by at least 1754 in the sense of “allowance or compensation for travel
or conveyance reckoned by the mile” and that was so politicians in the North
American colonies could calculate how much they could claim for travel
undertaken in the course of their word.
To this day, “travel allowances” remain the “entitlements” most valued
by politicians looking to “rort the system”.
From the mid 1830s, the idea of mileage as “a fixed rate per mile” came
into use in railroad system charging.
The meaning “a total number of miles” (of a way made, used, or
traversed) was from the 1860s while the figurative use (usefulness, derived
benefit) emerged at much the same time.
The long familiar mpg (miles per gallon) was a measure of fuel economy (miles
driven per gallon of fuel consumed) and came into use between 1910-1912. When the metric system was introduced to
jurisdictions previously using imperial measurement, instead of replacing mpg
with kpl (kilometres per litre), the measure used was L/100 km (litres per 100
km). According to engineers, L/100 km
was preferable because it emphasised consumption and thus aligned with other
measures expressed to consumers (such as electricity or emissions), the
argument being the psychology of “the lower the number the better” would be
standardized. So, whereas the higher the
MPG the lower was the fuel consumption whereas with L/100, greater efficiency
was implied by a lower number. In a
practical sense, because Continental Europe adopted L/100 km long before
widespread metrication in English-speaking countries, a convention had been
established so it would not have been logical to create another expression;
thus except in the US & UK, consumption follows the industry’s preferred “input
per output” method.
The terms milepost
and milestone were from the mid eighteenth century and described respectively
(1) a post permanently set in the ground next to a roadway to mark the distance
to or from a locality and (2) a stone permanently set in the ground and
engraved for the same purpose. The now
obsolete adjective milliary (of or relating to a mile, or to distance by miles;
denoting a mile or miles) dates from the 1640s and was from the Latin milliarius, from mille. The blended noun kilomile
(on the model of kilometre) was a unit of length equal to 1,000 miles and seems
to have existed because it could be done; it has no known use. In physics, the light-mile is the time taken
for light to travel one mile (approximately five microseconds). The light mile has never been part of the
standard set of measures in physics and probably it also was calculated by
someone because it could be done; it is of no known practical use although it
may have some utility in comparative tables.
Miles of Aisles was the first live concert album released
by Canadian-American singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell (b 1943). Released in 1974 on the Asylum label, it was
a double album in the usual gatefold sleeve, the recordings from a number of
concerts which were part of her tour promoting the recently released Court and Spark (1974) album. The performances on Miles of Aisles came variously
from three venues in Los Angeles: the Universal Amphitheatre, the Los Angeles
Music Center and the Berkeley Community Theater. The album’s cover art was a photograph of the
Pine Knob Music Theater in Clarkston, Michigan.The “Chinese mile” was the li, a traditional Chinese unit of
distance equal to 1500 Chinese feet or 150 zhangs;
sensibly, under the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), the li was standardized as a half-kilometre (500 metres). The “Scandinavian mile” began in 1649 as the “Swedish
mile” and was set at a distance of 10,688.54 metres before in 1889 being
defined as 10 kilometres. The “Irish
mile” was equal to 2240 yards (2048.256 metres; 1.272727 miles). The “Italian Mile” (sometimes left
untranslated as miglio (miglia the plural)) was a calque of the
Italian miglio (mile), with the
qualifier appended to distinguish it from other miles. Although the best remembered from the
peninsular (assisted by an appearance in the diaries of Galileo Galilei
(1564–1642)), the miglio was one of
many such regionalisms including the Genovese and Roman miles. Italy’s shift from traditional “Italian
miles” to the metric system happened gradually and unevenly over the nineteenth
century, the process beginning in the period 1806-1814 as a consequence of the Kingdom
of Italy being a client state of Napoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821; leader of the
French Republic 1799-1804 & Emperor of the French from 1804-1814 &
1815)). That however proved abortive
because after Napoleon’s fall in 1814, many Italian states reverted to their
traditional local units (miles, braccia,
libbre etc) and not until after Italian unification in 1861 was the metric
system officially adopted throughout the kingdom, becoming the legally mandated
system of weights and measures. In a act
of administrative efficiency which might astonish observers of the modern
Italian state, a definitive law of enforcement was passed in 1862 and, by the
1870s, successfully metrics had become the standard for administration, trade,
and education.
However, this
was Italy and among parts of the population, the “Italian mile” remained in
informal use well into the twentieth century and although the miglio generally was around 1.85 km
(1.15 miles), there were many regional variants including (1) the Florentine
(Tuscany) Miglio Fiorentino (1.74 km
(1.08 miles)) used in Galileo’s era, (2) the Venetian Miglio Veneto (almost identical to the Florentine, (3) the Roman Miglio Romano (1.48 km (.92 miles) which
was essentially the old “Roman mile”, (4) the Neapolitan Miglio Napoletano (1.852 km (1.15 miles) which was the
Mediterranean state’s contribution to the development of the nautical mile and
(5) the Milanese Miglio Milanese
which, at 1.85 km (1.495 miles) was close to the English nautical mile. What also remained was the nostalgic,
romantic attraction of the old words and although in 1927 when the Mille Miglia
(Thousand Miles) road race was established, Italy had for decades fully “been metric”,
the name was used to evoke the idea of a long tradition of endurance. The memorable phrase “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.”
is the opening line in the novel The
Go-Between (1953) by the English writer L. P. Hartley (1895–1972) and to
illustrate his point there is the old Mille Miglia, still in living memory.
The Mille
Miglia was a round trip from Rome to Brescia and back and by the mid 1950s the
cars had become very fast (speeds of 180 mph (290 km/h) were recorded and the
1955 race was won by a Mercedes-Benz 300 SLR (W196S) with an average speed
close to 100 mph (160 km/h)). At the
time, that was dangerous enough even on a purpose-built circuit but the Mille
Miglia was an event run on public roads which, while closed for the occasion,
were poorly supervised and crowd control was in many places non-existent,
people forming along the roadside to ensure the best view, literally inches
from cars travelling at high speed. Over
thirty years, the race had claimed the lives of 30 souls but the eleven in 1957
would be the last because within days, the Italian government banned all motor
racing on Italian public roads although since 1977 an event of the same name
over much the same course has been run for historic vehicles which competed in
the event in period (or were accepted and registered). Now very much a social occasion for the rich,
it's not a high-speed event. The
original event had been one of the classic events on the calendar in an era in
which top-line drivers counted on attending a couple of funerals a year (possibly
their own) and it’s the 1955 race to which a particular aura still lingers.
300 SLR (Moss & Jenkinson), Mille Migla, 1955.
Won by
Stirling Moss (1929-2020) and Denis Jenkinson (1920-1996), their Mercedes-Benz
300 SLR technically complied with the sports car regulations but it was really
the factory's formula one machine (W196R) with a bigger engine and a
streamlined body with seats for two. It
wasn't exactly a "grand prix car with headlights" as some
claimed but wasn't that far off; officially the W196S (Sports) in the factory
register, for marketing purposes it was dubbed (and badged) as the 300 SLR to
add lustre to the 300SL Gullwing coupé then on sale. The race was completed in 10 hours, 7 minutes
and 48 seconds, a average speed of 157.650 km/h (97.96 mph) (the course was
never exactly 1000 miles and that year was 1,597 km (992 miles) and at times,
the 300 SLR touched almost 180 mph which enabled Moss to cover the last 340 km
(211 miles) at an average speed of 265.7 km/h (165.1) mph. The record set in 1955 will stand for all
time because such a race will never happen again, the Italy which then existed now
truly a “foreign
country” in which things were done differently
In literary
use, the term “miles gloriosus” originated in a comedy by Plaurus (254-184
BC). The miles gloriosus was a braggart
soldier who, although a coward on the battlefield, boasts of heroic deeds in
combat; he was the prototype of a stock character comic drama, the one
whose true character is either notorious or discovered and is thus in the cast
to be made a fool of by other players. In
English drama he first
appeared eponymously in the five act play Ralph
Roister Doister (circa 1552 although not published until 1567) by the
English cleric & schoolmaster Nicholas Udall (1504-1556). The play was something of a landmark in
literature because it was one of the first works written in English which could
be classed as a “comedy” in the accepted meaning of the word. As a text it was of interest to the
proto-structuralists because it blended the conventions of Greek & Roman
comedies with the traditions of the English mediaeval theatre but the great
innovation was the appearance of recognizably “middle class” characters as
protagonists rather than the “supporting cast role” of doctors & lawyers
who had played “second fiddle” to the mostly royal or aristocratic
players. That the “growth market” in
theatre audiences came from this newly burgeoning class may at least in part accounted
for the literary novelty and its development clearly is identifiable in some of
the works of William Shakespeare (1564–1616).
Bobadill in Ben Jonson's (circa 1572-1637) Every Man in His Humour (1598) and Captain Brazen in George
Farquhar's (1677-1707) The Recruiting
Officer (1706) were exemplars of the playwrights’ depictions of a braggart
but just in case people didn’t get it, in his epic-length fantastical allegory The Faerie Queene (1590), the English
poet Edmund Spenser (circa 1552-1599) called his creation Braggadochio. The epitome of the breed was Shakespeare's
Falstaff. Sir John Falstaff was useful
to Shakespeare who had him appear in Henry
IV, Part 1 (circa 1596), Henry IV,
Part 2 (circa 1598) and The Merry
Wives of Windsor (1602). He was also
granted a posthumous reference in Henry V
(circa 1599), in which it's reported he has died off-stage.
The “last mile”
is a concept in urban planning, transport logistics and
telecommunications. In urban planning,
it refers to the final leg of an individual’s journey (traditionally
Monday-Friday) from their residence to their place of word in a city’s CBD
(central business district). In modern
cities, it’s a matter of great significance because while it is possible for a
great number of people to park their cars at train stations or other transport
interchanges a mile or more from the CBD, it would be impossible to accommodate
all these vehicles in the CBD. In
transport logistics, it describes the final stage of delivery of goods, etc,
from a distribution centre to the consumer, often involving greater effort or
expense. In telecommunications, it’s a
conceptual term assigned to those components of the infrastructure carrying communication
signals from the main system to the end user's business or home, often
involving greater expense to install and maintain, and lower transmission
speeds. The terms “final mile”, “last
kilometre” etc are synonymous. The
companion term “first mile” is from transport logistics and refers to the initial
stage of delivery of goods etc, from the seller or producer to a distribution
centre, often involving greater effort or expense. A “middle mile” is a piece of jargon from the
IT industry and refers to the segment of a telecommunications network linking
an operator's core network to the local network plant. Real nerds like to explain it as something
like the “middleware layer” between software and hardware but the analogy is
weak.
A “nautical
mile” is a unit of length corresponding approximately to one minute of arc of
latitude along any meridian. By
international agreement it is exactly 1,852 metres (approximately 6,076 feet or
1.151 of a statute mile; the abbreviations variously used are NM, M, nmi &
nm (the latter conflicting with nanometre symbol although confusion is unlikely). The term “sea mile” is now rarely used but in
its odd appearance it’s either (1) a synonym for “nautical mile” or (2) (usually
as “sea miles”) a reference to the age of a ship or experience of a
sailor. The original “sea mile” was a
now obsolete Scandinavian unit of distance (about 4 nautical miles), a calque
of the Danish sømil, the Norwegian
Bokmål sjømil and the Swedish sjömil, the construct being the Danish sø (sea, nautical, maritime) + mil (the Danish mile or league). The geographical mile (a unit of length
corresponding to exactly one minute of arc (1/60 of a degree) along the Earth's
equator (about 1855.4 meters, 2029.1 yards, or roughly 8/7 international miles)
was also used as (an inexact) synonym of “nautical mile”.
Many critics list Eight Miles High (1966) by The Byrds as the first true psychedelic rock song and the band's claim it had nothing to do with drug use was about as creditable as the Beatles asserting their song Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds (1967) was not a thinly veiled reference to was not an allusion to LSD (the hallucinogenic drug lysergic acid diethylamide, better known as “acid”). The lyrics from Eight Miles High genuinely were inspired by the band's flight to London in 1965 but “eight” was chosen because it best suited the music, even though commercial airliners didn't fly at quite that altitude. At the time, the typical flight paths for the New York-London route involved a ceiling somewhat lower: Boeing 707, 33,000-37,000 feet (6.25-7.00 miles); Douglas DC-8, 32,000-39,000 feet (6.06-7.39 miles); Vickers VC10, 33,000-40,000 feet (6.25-7.58 miles). In the context of artistic licence, eight was “close enough for rock 'n' roll”. The song by the Byrds was not an allusion to the “mile-high club”, an institution one (informally) becomes a member of by having sex while aboard an aircraft in flight. Although now most associated with those who contrive to do the act(s) on a commercial flight, “membership” has been claimed by those who managed the feat in both private and military aviation and the first known reference to the concept dates from 1785, early in the age of the hot-air balloon although the threshold then was set to a more modest 1,000 feet (0.1893939 of a mile).
The “international mile” is the same as the “land mile” & “modern mile” (ie the internationally agreed definition of 1.609344 kilometres) and the rarely used terms were coined simply to remove ambiguity in legal or other documents because over the centuries “mile” had in different places described distances greatly differing in length. The mysterious “US survey mile” (1609.347 metres) is slightly longer than the now almost universal “international mile” and that’s a product of it being 5,280 US “survey feet” (0.30480061 metres) in length, the latter also slightly longer than the familiar 12 inch (304.8 mm) “international foot”). To make things really murky, in the US, in formal use, a “statute mile” refers to a “survey mile” despite the lengths being slightly different. Because the variation is less than ⅛ inch (3.2 mm), for most purposes this is something of no significance but over very long distances, it can matter if things like boundaries or target vectors are being documented, thus the need for precision in certain aspects of mapping. Being a federal system with a long tradition of “states rights”, even when in 1983 the revised North American Datum (NAD83) was compiled and published by the NGS (National Geodetic Survey, a part of the NOAA (National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration under the Department of Commerce)), the states retained the right to determine which (if any) definitions of distance they would use. So, despite all State Plane Coordinate Systems being expressed in metric measurements, eight of the 50 states opted out of the metre-based system, seven using “US survey feet” and one “international feet”.
A “sporting”
pursuit which merges the traditions of athletic track & field competition
with the drunken antics of university students, the “Beer Mile” is conducted
usually on a standard 400 m (¼ mile) track as a 1 mile (1.6 km) contest of both
running & drinking speed. Each of the
four laps begins with the competitor drinking one can (12 fl oz (US) (355 ml))
of beer, followed by a full lap, the process repeated three times. The rules have been defined by the governing
body which also publishes the results, including the aggregates of miles
covered and beers drunk. Now a sporting
institution, it has encouraged imitators and there are a number of variations,
each with its own rules. The holder of
this most prestigious world record is Canadian Corey Bellemore (b 1994), a five-time
champion, who, at the Beer Mile World Classic in Portugal in July 2025, broke
his own world record, re-setting setting the mark to 4:27.1. That may be compared with the absolute world
record for the mile, held by Morocco’s Hicham El Guerrouj (b 1974) who in 1999
ran the distance in 3:43.13, his additional pace made possible by not being
delayed by having to down four beers.
Some
variations of the beer mile simply increase the volume or strength of the beer
consumed but in Australia & New Zealand, some were dubbed “Chunder Mile”
(chunder being circa 1950s antipodean slang for vomiting and of disputed
origin) on the not unreasonable basis that vomiting becomes increasingly more
likely and frequent the more alcohol is consumed. For some however, even this wasn’t
sufficiently debauched and there were events which demanded a (cold) meat pie
be enjoyed with a jug of (un-chilled) beer (a jug typically 1140 ml (38.5 fl oz
(US)) at the start of each of the four laps.
Predictably, these events were most associated with orientation weeks at
universities, a number still conducted as late as the 1970s and the best
documented seems to have been those at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New
Zealand. Even by the standards of a
country producing abundant supplies of strong beer and weed, the students at Otago
were notorious for retreating from civilized ways although, it was at the time the
site of the country’s medical school, thereby providing students with practical
experience of both symptoms and treatments for the inevitable
consequences. Whether the event was
invented in Dunedin isn’t known but, given the nature of males aged 17-25
probably hasn’t much changed over the millennia, it wouldn’t be surprising to
learn similar competitions, localized to suit culinary tastes, have been
contested by the drunken youth of many places in centuries past. As it was, even in Dunedin, times were
changing and in 1972, the Chunder Mile was banned “…because of the dangers of asphyxiation and
ruptured esophaguses.” Undetred,
the students found other amusements.
In
idiomatic use, to say “a mile wide and an inch deep” suggests someone or
something covering a wide array of topics but on only a very shallow level
(thus analogous with “jack of all trades and master of none”. Despite the negative connotations, the “mile
wide, inch deep” model can in many fields be useful. In informal use, a “neg mile” is a unit of
“saved travel” (ie an expression of a distance not having to be
travelled). A “mile-a-minute” means
literally “60 mph” but was an expression used generally to mean “fast”, dating
on a time where such a pace really was fast and although the World’s LSR (land
speed record) was in 1899 set at 65.79 mph (105.88 km/h) and cars capable of
the speed were in volume production by the 1920s, until the development of
freeway systems (which, at scale, really began only in the 1950s), a sustained
60 mph wasn’t an everyday reality for most.
Indeed, in 1957 the admittedly hardly state-of-the-art British railway
system was described as offering “mile-a-minute” journeys and then, in most
cases, point-to-point, it would have been the quickest method.
Although Herr
Professor Ferdinand Porsche (1875–1951) wouldn’t have used the expression
“mile-a-minute” when explaining to Adolf Hitler (1889-1945; Führer (leader) and
German head of government 1933-1945 & head of state 1934-1945) the dynamics
of his KdF-Wagen, one of his claims was its ability to cruise “all day at 100 km/h” (ie a
mile-a-minute) and that was true, the car unusual in being able to cruise at
what was about its maximum speed. That
wouldn’t much have mattered were it not for the existence of the vast network
of Autobahns Hitler was having constructed for a variety of reasons (job
creation, military logistics, propaganda etc) but all those long roads and the KdF-Wagen
were a perfect match. The KdF-wagen (Kdf
car) was notionally the product of the Gemeinschaft
Kraft durch Freude (KdF, “Strength Through Joy”), the state-controlled
organization which was under the auspices of the Deutsche Arbeitsfront (German Labor Front) which replaced the
independent labor unions. The car was
soon renamed the Volkswagen Type 1 (people’s car) and it became better known in
the post-war years as the “Beetle”, 21,529,464 of which left assembly lines
between 1938-2003. In the spirit of the
KdF, in 1938 a scheme was announced whereby Germans could buy a Type 1 for 990
RM (Reichsmark) on the basis of depositing 5 RM per week. The 990 RM was a number unrelated to economic
reality and just an example of the regime’s propaganda but as things turned
out, during the Third Reich (1933-1945) not one Type 1 was delivered to a
civilian customer with the factory’s entire output allocated to the military or
the Nazi Party. It wasn’t until the
early 1960s there were settlements in the last of the cases brought by those Germans
who dutifully had for years continued to make their 5 RM deposits.
Since the
1580s the word had been used generically to mean “a great distance” and it’s
used also as an intensifier, sometimes rather loosely and an expression like “the new beer tastes miles better than the
old” is along the lines of a well understood phrase like “heaps of water”. Although in idiomatic use, “mile” tends to
imply something large, if an actual distance is being referenced, context
matters because something said to have “missed
by a mile” might literally have “missed
by an inch”. Related to that is the
expression “a miss is a good as a mile”
which means if one misses the target, often it matters not whether one missed
by a fraction of an inch or a thousand miles..
If it’s said “give them an inch
and they’ll take a mile” that means if someone is granted some slight right
or concession, they will exploit that to take more. In Middle English the word also was a unit of
time, reckoned usually to mean “about 20 minutes”, reflecting how long it would
take the typical, fit male to walk the distance.
The “quarter-mile”
is literally one quarter of a statute mile (and thus (measurement of 440 yards;
1,320 feet; 402.336). The emergence in
the post-war United States of the sport of drag racing was a product of (1)
dotted around the country there were a large number of tarmac airstrips which
had become surplus with the end of World War II (1939-1945), (2) a large number
of young men returned from service in the armed forces with sufficient
disposable income to race cars and (3) a stocks of cars suitable to be “hotted-up”
for use in acceleration tests. The
quarter-mile became the sport’s “standard distance” because of a mixture of cultural
precedent and technical determinism (of the machines and the surfaces). In the 1930s, even before “hot rodding”
became a thing in the post-war years, young men were “street racing”, competing
against each either from “light-to-light” or on semi-rural roads straight
enough to be (1) suitable for purpose and (2) offering enough visibility to
allow competitors to escape upon sighting a police car. Many were informally measured (“tree-to-tree”
for example) but some were better organized (air-strips even then used) and the
quarter-mile was ideal because in the era a typical “well-set up” car could
attain speed high enough to demonstrate its power and acceleration yet still be
within the limits of safety imposed by most straight sections of road. When the NHRA (National Hot Rod Association)
was founded in 1951 to provide an organizational structure to street racing (and
“get it off the streets” where it was becoming controversial), there was no
debate about the default distance: a ¼ mile it was because that’s what just
about everybody had been doing.
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