a unit of length equal to 1,760 yards or 5,280 feet; exactly 1609.344 meters
"The marathon runner finished the race just under twenty-six miles away from where she had started."
a unit of length used in navigation; exactly 1,852 meters; historically based on the distance spanned by one minute of arc in latitude
"The captain adjusted the ship's course to maintain our position within one nautical mile of the lighthouse."
a former British unit of length equivalent to 6,080 feet (1,853.184 meters); 800 feet longer than a statute mile
"The surveyor corrected the map because they had mistakenly measured the ancient Roman road using modern miles instead of the true imperial mile that was eighty feet longer."
an ancient Roman unit of length equivalent to 1620 yards
"The ancient road markers indicated that Rome was exactly a mile away, which in those days meant roughly 1620 yards."
a Swedish unit of length equivalent to 10 km
"The hikers measured their progress in miles, knowing that each one covered ten kilometers across the Scandinavian landscape."
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.
"After converting the marathon distance from kilometers back to miles using the international standard, we confirmed the race was exactly twenty-six point two miles long."
In plain English: A mile is a standard unit of distance equal to 1,760 yards or about 1.6 kilometers used to measure how far something is.
"We drove three miles to get to the beach."
Usage: Use "mile" to describe a standard unit of distance equal to 1.609 kilometers, commonly found on road signs and maps for measuring travel length. It is often confused with the metric term "kilometer," but in everyday Anglophone usage, one mile always represents approximately five-eighths of a kilometer.
The word "mile" comes from the Latin mīle, which literally means "thousand." It originally referred to a distance of one thousand paces.