Statute Miles

The mile, sometimes the international mile or statute mile to distinguish it from other miles, is a British imperial unit and United States customary unit of distance; both are based on the older English unit of length equal to 5,280 English feet, or 1,760 yards. The statute mile was standardised between the British Commonwealth and the United States by an international agreement in 1959, when it was formally redefined with respect to SI units as exactly .

With qualifiers, ''mile'' is also used to describe or translate a wide range of units derived from or roughly equivalent to the Roman mile, such as the nautical mile (now exactly), the Italian mile (roughly ), and the Chinese mile (now exactly). The Romans divided their mile into 5,000 Roman feet but the greater importance of furlongs in Elizabethan-era England meant that the statute mile was made equivalent to or in 1593. This form of the mile then spread across the British Empire, some successor states of which continue to employ the mile. The US Geological Survey now employs the metre for official purposes, but legacy data from its 1927 geodetic datum has meant that a separate US survey mile continues to see some use, although it was officially phased out in 2022. While most countries replaced the mile with the kilometre when switching to the International System of Units (SI), the international mile continues to be used in some countries, such as Liberia, the United Kingdom, the United States, and a number of countries with fewer than one million inhabitants, most of which are UK or US territories or have close historical ties with the UK or US.

Name

The modern English word ''mile'' derives from Middle English ' and Old English ', which was cognate with all other Germanic terms for ''miles''. These derived from the nominal ellipsis form of ' 'mile' or ' 'miles', the Roman mile of one thousand paces.

The present international mile is usually what is understood by the unqualified term ''mile''. When this distance needs to be distinguished from the nautical mile, the international mile may also be described as a land mile or statute mile. In British English, ''statute mile'' may refer to the present international mile or to any other form of English mile since the 1593 Act of Parliament, which set it as a distance of . Under American law, however, ''statute mile'' refers to the US survey mile. Foreign and historical units translated into English as ''miles'' usually employ a qualifier to describe the kind of mile being used but this may be omitted if it is obvious from the context, such as a discussion of the 2nd-century Antonine Itinerary describing its distances in terms of ''miles'' rather than ''Roman miles''.

Abbreviation

The mile has been variously abbreviated in English—with and without a trailing period—as "mi", "M", "ml", and "m". The American National Institute of Standards and Technology now uses and recommends "mi" to avoid confusion with the SI metre (m) and millilitre (ml). However, derived units such as miles per hour or miles per gallon continue to be abbreviated as "mph" and "mpg" rather than "mi/h" and "mi/gal". In the United Kingdom, road signs use "m" as the abbreviation for mile though height and width restrictions also use "m" as the symbol for the metre, which may be displayed alongside feet and inches. The BBC
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