2282: Length of a Mile: Past and Present Mar 16, 2021

Though most countries have officially switched to the metric system, there are some ways in which imperial terminology has crept back in. For instance, in Norway and Sweden people still use the word for 'mile' to refer to a distance of 10 kilometers. Historically, in those places a mile would have been between 10.688 kilometers in Sweden to 11.295 kilometers in Norway. Earlier still, in both Scandinavia and Germany it was equal to 4 minutes of arc or just over 7,421m (a Roman mile was about 1 minute arc on the Earth's surface). Similarly large, in Russia a mill unit was equal to seven versta, or about 7,468 meters, many times larger than a mile in the US. There is some debate about the length of Aramaic term מיל (mil), but most agree on 2,000 cubits (~3,000ft or close to a kilometer), but some say it is equivalent to the Roman mile since this is where the term comes from.