Mileage

How to spell mileage

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce mileage

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does mileage mean?

1. nounThe total number of miles travelled, or the distance a vehicle covers on a given amount of fuel.
2. nounThe amount of use, benefit, or advantage gained from something.

Mileage in a sentence

• The used car had surprisingly low mileage for its age.

• The team got plenty of mileage out of that single advertising slogan.

• A smaller engine usually gives better mileage on long trips.

• There is still good mileage left in these old work boots.

Where does mileage come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word is built from 'mile' plus the noun-forming suffix '-age', which English absorbed from Old French and ultimately from the Latin '-aticum', an ending used to form nouns of collective measure, charge, or rate (the same '-age' that gives us 'postage', 'acreage', and 'baggage'). The root 'mile' itself goes much further back, to the Latin 'mille passus', meaning 'a thousand paces', the standard distance a Roman army measured out on the march. Old English borrowed 'mil' from that Latin source long before the Norman Conquest, and by the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the '-age' formation produced 'mileage' to mean a total distance counted in miles. The spelling trap lives in that join: 'mile' keeps its silent final 'e' before '-age', giving 'mileage' rather than the often-written 'milage'. The figurative sense, getting good value or use out of something, grew naturally from the literal idea of how far a vehicle travels per unit of fuel.

How the word is built

• mile (a unit of distance)
• -age (noun suffix forming a measure or amount)