Miles

How to spell miles

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce miles

What does miles mean?

1. nounMore than one mile, a unit of distance equal to 1,760 yards.

Miles in a sentence

• The nearest petrol station is several miles down the motorway.

• She runs four miles before work most mornings.

Where does miles come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This is the plural of mile, a word that travelled into English from the Latin mille, meaning 'thousand'. The Roman unit was the mille passuum, literally 'a thousand paces', a pace being a full double step of a marching soldier, which worked out to roughly 1,480 modern metres. Old English borrowed the term as mil long before the Norman Conquest, and over centuries the English mile was redefined and eventually fixed by statute at 1,760 yards. The same mille root survives in 'millennium' (a thousand years) and 'millimetre' (a thousandth of a metre). The plural simply adds -s, so the spelling holds no real trap beyond remembering the silent reading of the long 'i'.

How the word is built

• mile (unit of distance)
• -s (plural)