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 Commonwealth of Nations and the United States by an international agreement in 1959, when it was formally redefined with respect to SI units as exactly 1,609.344 metres.
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.[2] 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 1,760 yards. Under American law, however, statute mile refers to the US survey mile.[3] 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.
In Hellenic areas of the Empire, the Roman mile (Greek: μίλιον, mlion) was used beside the native Greek units as equivalent to 8 stadia of 600 Greek feet. The mlion continued to be used as a Byzantine unit and was also used as the name of the zero mile marker for the Byzantine Empire, the Milion, located at the head of the Mese near Hagia Sophia.
The Italian mile (miglio, pl. 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.[15] It was often used in international contexts from the Middle Ages into the 17th century[14] and is thus also known as the "geographical mile",[16] although the geographical mile is now a separate standard unit.
The Arabic mile (الميل, al-mīl) was not the common Arabic unit of length; instead, Arabs and Persians traditionally used the longer parasang or "Arabic league". The Arabic mile was, however, used by medieval geographers and scientists and constituted a kind of precursor to the nautical or geographical mile. It extended the Roman mile to fit an astronomical approximation of 1 arcminute of latitude measured directly north-and-south along a meridian. Although the precise value of the approximation remains disputed, it was somewhere between 1.8 and 2.0 km.
The "old English mile" of the medieval and early modern periods varied but seems to have measured about 1.3 international miles (2.1 km).[17][18] The old English mile varied over time and location within England.[18] The old English mile has also been defined as 79,200 or 79,320 inches (1.25 or 1.2519 statute miles).[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.[20]
The origins of English units are "extremely vague and uncertain",[21][citation needed] but seem to have been a combination of the Roman system with native British and Germanic systems both derived from multiples of the barleycorn.[n 2] Probably by the reign of Edgar in the 10th century, the nominal prototype physical standard of English length was an arm-length iron bar (a yardstick) held by the king at Winchester;[22][21] the foot was then one-third of its length. Henry I was said to have made a new standard in 1101 based on his own arm.[21] Following the issuance of Magna Carta in 1215, the barons of Parliament directed John and his son to keep the king's standard measure (Mensura Domini Regis) and weight at the Exchequer,[21] which thereafter verified local standards until its abolition in the 19th century. New brass standards are known to have been constructed under Henry VII and Elizabeth I.[24]
The Scots mile was longer than the English mile,[35] as mentioned by Robert Burns in the first verse of his poem "Tam o' Shanter". It comprised 8 (Scots) furlongs divided into 320 falls or faws (Scots rods).[36] It varied from place to place but the most accepted equivalencies are 1,976 Imperial yards (1.123 statute miles or 1.81 km).It was legally abolished three times: first by a 1685 act of the Scottish Parliament,[37] again by the 1707 Treaty of Union with England,[38] and finally by the Weights and Measures Act 1824.[35] It had continued in use as a customary unit through the 18th century but had become obsolete by its final abolition.
The Breslau mile, used in Breslau, and from 1630 officially in all of Silesia, equal to 11,250 ells, or about 6,700 meters. The mile equaled the distance from the Piaskowa Gate all the way to Psie Pole (Hundsfeld). By rolling a circle with a radius of 5 ells through Piaskowa Island, Ostrw Tumski and suburban tracts, passing eight bridges on the way, the standard Breslau mile was determined.[44][45]
The CJK Compatibility Unicode block contains square-format versions of Japanese names for measurement units as written in katakana script.Among them, there is .mw-parser-output .monospacedfont-family:monospace,monospaceU+3344 SQUARE MAIRU, after マイル mairu.
The old Imperial value of the yard was used in converting measurements to metric values in India in a 1976 Act of the Indian Parliament.[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.
While most countries abandoned the mile when switching to the metric system, the international mile continues to be used in some countries, such as Liberia, Myanmar,[59] the United Kingdom[60] and the United States.[61] It is also used in a number of territories with less than a million inhabitants, most of which are UK or US territories, or have close historical ties with the UK or US: American Samoa,[62] Bahamas,[63] Belize,[64] British Virgin Islands,[65] Cayman Islands,[66] Dominica,[66] Falkland Islands,[67] Grenada,[68] Guam,[69] The N. Mariana Islands,[70] Samoa,[71] St. Lucia,[72] St. Vincent & The Grenadines,[73] St. Helena,[74] St. Kitts & Nevis,[75] the Turks & Caicos Islands,[76] and the US Virgin Islands.[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 North American Datum of 1983 (NAD83), which replaced the NAD27, is defined in metres. State Plane Coordinate Systems were then updated, but the National Geodetic Survey left individual states to decide which (if any) definition of the foot they would use. All State Plane Coordinate Systems are defined in metres, and 42 of the 50 states only use the metre-based State Plane Coordinate Systems. However, eight states also have State Plane Coordinate Systems defined in feet, seven of them in US survey feet and one in international feet.[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). Twenty-four states have legislated that surveying measures be based on the US survey foot, eight have legislated that they be based on the international foot, and eighteen have not specified which conversion factor to use.[83]
SPCS 83 legislation refers to state legislation that has been passed or updated using the newer 1983 NAD data. Most states have done so. Two states, Alaska and Missouri, and two jurisdictions, Guam and Puerto Rico, do not specify which foot to use.[83] Two states, Alabama and Hawaii, and four jurisdictions, Washington, DC, US Virgin Islands, American Samoa and Northern Mariana Islands, do not have SPCS 83 legislation.[83]
In October 2019, US National Geodetic Survey and National Institute of Standards and Technology announced their joint intent to retire the US survey foot and US survey mile, as permitted by their 1959 decision, with effect on January 1, 2023.[84][85][86]
The nautical mile was originally defined as one minute of arc along a meridian of the Earth.[87] Navigators use dividers to step off the distance between two points on the navigational chart, then place the open dividers against the minutes-of-latitude scale at the edge of the chart, and read off the distance in nautical miles.[88] The Earth is not perfectly spherical but an oblate spheroid, so the length of a minute of latitude increases by 1% from the equator to the poles. Using the WGS84 ellipsoid, the commonly accepted Earth model for many purposes today, one minute of latitude at the WGS84 equator is 6,046 feet and at the poles is 6,107.5 feet. The average is about 6,076 feet (about 1,852 metres or 1.15 statute miles).
The nautical mile per hour is known as the knot. Nautical miles and knots are almost universally used for aeronautical and maritime navigation, because of their relationship with degrees and minutes of latitude and the convenience of using the latitude scale on a map for distance measuring.
The data mile is used in radar-related subjects and is equal to 6,000 feet (1.8288 kilometres).[90] The radar mile is a unit of time (in the same way that the light year is a unit of distance), equal to the time required for a radar pulse to travel a distance of two miles (one mile each way). Thus, the radar statute mile is 10.8 μs and the radar nautical mile is 12.4 μs.[91]
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