These derived from the nominal ellipsis form of mīlle passus 'mile' or mīlia passuum 'miles', the Roman mile of one thousand paces.

[4] The American National Institute of Standards and Technology now uses and recommends "mi" to avoid confusion with the SI metre (m) and millilitre (ml).

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.

; also milia passuum[n 2] and mille) consisted of a thousand paces as measured by every other step—as in the total distance of the left foot hitting the ground 1,000 times.

[9] When Roman legionaries were well-fed and harshly driven in good weather, they thus created longer miles.

The Roman mile spread throughout Europe, with its local variations giving rise to the different units.

On these was carved a Roman numeral, indicating the number of miles from the centre of Rome – the Forum.

miglia) was traditionally considered a direct continuation of the Roman mile, equal to 1000 paces,[14] although its actual value over time or between regions could vary greatly.

It extended the Roman mile to fit an astronomical approximation of 1 arcminute of latitude measured directly north-and-south along a meridian.

[19] The English long continued the Roman computations of the mile as 5,000 feet, 1,000 paces, or 8 longer divisions, which they equated with their "furrow's length" or furlong.

The English statute mile was established by a Weights and Measures Act of Parliament in 1593 during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I.

The act on the Composition of Yards and Perches had shortened the length of the foot and its associated measures, causing the two methods of determining the mile to diverge.

Along with other Welsh units, it was said to have been codified under Dyfnwal the Bald and Silent and retained unchanged by Hywel the Good.

The Dutch kleine mile had the historical definition of one hour's walking (uur gaans), which was defined as 24 stadia, 3000 paces, or 15,000 Amsterdam or Rhineland feet (respectively 4,250 m or 4,710 m).

In 1617, Willebrord Snellius calculated a degree of the circumference of the Earth at 28,500 Rijnlantsche Roeden (within 3.5% of the actual value), which resulted in a Dutch mile of 1900 rods.

[42] By the mid-seventeenth century, map scales assigned 2000 rods to the common Dutch mile, which equalled around 7,535 m (reducing the discrepancy with latitude measurement to less than 2%).

Today, the word mijl is no longer used, except as part of certain proverbs and compound terms like mijlenver ("miles away").

By rolling a circle with a radius of 5 ells through Piaskowa Island, Ostrów Tumski and suburban tracts, passing eight bridges on the way, the standard Breslau mile was determined.

The Croatian mile (hrvatska milja), first devised by the Jesuit Stjepan Glavač on a 1673 map, is the length of an arc of the equator subtended by ⁠1/10⁠° or 11.13 km exactly.

The CJK Compatibility Unicode block contains square-format versions of Japanese names for measurement units as written in katakana script.

[52] It was established as part of the 1959 international yard and pound agreement reached by the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the Union of South Africa,[53] which resolved small but measurable differences that had arisen from separate physical standards each country had maintained for the yard.

[55] However, the current National Topographic Database of the Survey of India is based on the metric WGS-84 datum,[56] which is also used by the Global Positioning System.

[77] The mile is even encountered in Canada, though this is predominantly in rail transport and horse racing, as the roadways have been metricated since 1977.

[78][79][80][81] Ireland gradually replaced miles with kilometres, including in speed measurements; the process was completed in 2005.

The United States redefined its yard in 1893, and this resulted in US and Imperial measures of distance having very slightly different lengths.

[83] State legislation in the US is important for determining which conversion factor from the metric datum is to be used for land surveying and real estate transactions, even though the difference (2 ppm) is hardly significant, given the precision of normal surveying measurements over short distances (usually much less than a mile).

[89] In the United States, the nautical mile was defined in the 19th century as 6,080.2 feet (1,853.24 m), whereas in the United Kingdom, the Admiralty nautical mile was defined as 6,080 feet (1,853.18 m) and was about one minute of latitude in the latitudes of the south of the UK.

[93] The Scandinavian mile (mil) remains in common use in Norway and Sweden, where it has meant precisely 10 km since metrication in 1889.

The traditional Finnish peninkulma was translated as Swedish: mil and also set equal to 10 km during metrication in 1887, but is much less commonly used.

Similar units: The mile is still used in a variety of idioms, even in English-speaking countries that have moved from the Imperial to the metric system (for example, Australia, Canada, or New Zealand).