Talk:Mile

Origin of Mile

Not mentioned in this article is that the word mile derives from mille passum which was latin for thousand paces, it was not defined any other way resulting in mile units all over Europe of varying lengths until the metric system was adopted. I think this information need to be included. Avi8tor (talk) 12:46, 26 February 2023 (UTC)

It is a simplier habbit of Swedish miles

The following:

"In Norway and Sweden, a mil is a unit of length equal to 10 kilometres and commonly used in everyday language. However in more formal situations, such as on road signs and when there is risk of confusion with English miles, kilometres are used instead."

should be replaced by this:

"In Norway and Sweden, a mil is a unit of length equal to 10 kilometres and commonly used in everyday language. However in all formal situations, such as on road signs and law, kilometres are used. For instance road signs are read in km (like 348 km) and the last digit rounded up and always expressed in common talk always in miles (like 35 miles!)." — Preceding unsigned comment added by 90.129.184.177 (talk) 06:35, 24 December 2011 (UTC)

When you wrote always expressed in common talk always in miles (like 35 miles!)., did you intend to write "mils"? (no ⟨e⟩)? Meanwhile I will remove the silly "risk of confusion with English miles" since the risk must be nearly zero. --𝕁𝕄𝔽 (talk) 17:09, 28 March 2023 (UTC)

Statute mile

It looks like this article has dozens of references to the term "statute mile" which it uses in three different ways (modern British, modern American, and past version) often without clarifying which is which. Someone should probably clean that up, but it's such a mess that I'm reluctant to tackle it. - Burner89751654 (talk) 02:00, 26 February 2025 (UTC)

Image of old german table of equivalences

Various historic miles and leagues from an 1848 German textbook, given in feet, metres, and fractions of a "degree of meridian"

This table takes an inordinate amount of space and knocks all the images below it out of kilter with the sections they illustrate. Do we really need it? Does it satisfy MOS:IMAGEREL?

Images must be significant and relevant in the topic's context, not primarily decorative. Each image in an article should have a clear and unique illustrative purpose and serve as an important illustrative aid to understanding the subject. When possible, find better images and improve captions rather than simply removing poor or inappropriate ones, especially on pages with few visuals. However, not every article needs images, and too many can be distracting: usually, less is more.

What is it illustrating? 𝕁𝕄𝔽 (talk) 17:20, 28 August 2025 (UTC)

A bit hard to decode but much easier with the caption in the article 'Various historic miles and leagues from an 1848 German textbook, given in feet, metres, and fractions of a "degree of meridian"'. It shows many different lengths for the mile for many countries. There is only a single image that gets pushed by it, so I'm happy for it to stay.

Alternatively, convert it to a table (with English labels) and use its original source as a reference.  Stepho  talk  01:46, 29 August 2025 (UTC)

Make it a collapsed table. ᛒᛚᚮᚴᚴᚼᛆᛁ ᛭ 𝔅𝔩𝔬𝔠𝔨𝔥𝔞𝔧 01:56, 29 August 2025 (UTC)

British English

@Imaginatorium: The state of this article is ridiculous. Quotes have been altered to make them conform to British English. If the subject of a sentence or section is the United States, British English is used. I only tried to fix these absurdities. The status quo is unacceptable. Philosopher Spock (talk) 06:20, 20 March 2026 (UTC)

The actual spelling and grammar used in quotations should be replicated verbatim. Any surrounding text must comply with MOS:ENGVAR. No exceptions. JMF𝕁𝕄𝔽 (talk) 09:22, 20 March 2026 (UTC)

The problem is that these are not quotes. The guidelines do not say "If the subject of a sentence is the US, then... anything". Imaginatorium (talk) 14:14, 20 March 2026 (UTC)

Quotes should be verbatim. But if we are merely saying what the reference says in our own words (preferred in WP) then we use the dialect of English that the article is written in (British in this case). We do it this way so that editors don't constant revert each other to change the article into their preferred dialect and so that the article remains a single consistent dialect instead of chopping and changing (with limited use of direct quotes excepted). 10 years back it was such a mess of mixed dialects and edit wars over dialect spelling. Since then it has become so much more consistent, professional and less antagonistic.  Stepho  talk  00:20, 21 March 2026 (UTC)

To clarify, the quotes are in refs 65 & 90. But the problem is bigger than that, IMO. This subject has strong national ties to the USA. It also has national ties to the UK, though I don't know how strong they still are. Isn't the UK more metric than the US? If "a single consistent dialect" is required, I think we should switch to American English. We could also avoid the problem by using "km". Philosopher Spock (talk) 21:31, 21 March 2026 (UTC)

You have the ties argument backwards. The US has strong ties to miles. So does the UK. But that doesn't mean that miles has strong ties to either country. It is a one way thing. Since they are the opposite in spelling, that means that "miles" has no strong tie to either country and therefore one form of spelling was picked arbitrarily in the early days. That form was then applied consistently (direct quotes excepted). All this is covered in WP:RETAIN and WP:ENGVAR. We do this so that we don't spend endless hours on something that has no universally acceptable solution.  Stepho  talk  23:51, 21 March 2026 (UTC)