the.com/mile
a Roman soldier's thousand paces, frozen into law long after the legions marched off.
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.
- latin root
- From mille passus, meaning one thousand paces
- nautical twist
- Sea miles are longer, based on Earth's curve
- sub-four
- Roger Bannister broke four minutes in 1954
- odd number
- Exactly 5,280 feet, a deeply weird figure
becher's brook — infamous jump on the grand national steeplechase course at aintree, england
mile high stadium — denver broncos nfl stadium at exactly 1 mile above sea level