Mile

name, noun, slang

name, noun, slang ·1 syllable ·Common ·Middle school level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 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."

  2. 2
    a footrace extending one mile wordnet
  3. 3
    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.

    "Athelstan Arundel walked home all the way, foaming and raging. No omnibus, cab, or conveyance ever built could contain a young man in such a rage. His mother lived at Pembridge Square, which is four good measured miles from Lincoln's Inn."

  4. 4
    a unit of length equal to 1,760 yards or 5,280 feet; exactly 1609.344 meters wordnet
  5. 5
    Any of many customary units of length derived from the Roman mile (mille passus) of 8 stades or 5,000 Roman feet.
Show 12 more definitions
  1. 6
    a Swedish unit of length equivalent to 10 km wordnet
  2. 7
    The Scandinavian mile: a unit of length precisely equal to 10 kilometers defined in 1889.
  3. 8
    an ancient Roman unit of length equivalent to 1620 yards wordnet
  4. 9
    Any of many customary units of length from other measurement systems of roughly similar values, as the Chinese mile or Arabic mile.
  5. 10
    a unit of length used in navigation; exactly 1,852 meters; historically based on the distance spanned by one minute of arc in latitude wordnet
  6. 11
    An airline mile in a frequent flyer program.
  7. 12
    a former British unit of length equivalent to 6,080 feet (1,853.184 meters); 800 feet longer than a statute mile wordnet
  8. 13
    Any similarly large distance. informal

    "The shot missed by a mile."

  9. 14
    a former British unit of length once used in navigation; equivalent to 6,000 feet (1828.8 meters) wordnet
  10. 15
    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."

  11. 16
    a large distance wordnet
  12. 17
    One mile per hour, as a measure of speed. colloquial

    "five miles over the speed limit"

Proper Noun
  1. 1
    A transliteration of the Macedonian male given name Миле (Mile)
  2. 2
    A county-level city of Honghe prefecture, Yunnan, China.

Synonyms

All synonyms
admiralty mileair milegeographical mileimperial systeminternational mileinternational nautical mile

Example

More examples

"The school stands about one mile off."

Etymology

Etymology 1

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”)).

Etymology 2

From Macedonian Ми́ле (Míle).

Etymology 3

From the Hanyu Pinyin romanization of the Mandarin 彌勒 /弥勒 (Mílè).

Related phrases

Arab mileArabian mileArabic mileChinese mileCurry MileEight Mile CreekEight Mile PlainsEighteen MileEighty Mile BeachFifteen MileFive MilesForty Mile

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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.