means A unit of distance equal to 5,280 feet (about 1.6 kilometres), used for measuring how far places lie apart.

from From Latin *mille passus*, 'a thousand paces' — and a Roman 'pace' was two steps, left-and-right, roughly five feet, so a thousand of them stretched close to 5,000 Roman feet. English took it as *mil* and carried it through Old English, but the number drifted: by statute the English mile was eventually fixed at 5,280 feet, no longer matching any marching legion. So the word is the ghost of a soldier's counted footsteps, preserved in law even after the original measurement quietly changed underneath it.