Barleycorns to Miles (bc to mi)

1 barleycorn equals 0.000005260942761 miles (rounded).

1 barleycorn = 0.000005260942761 miles

How to convert barleycorns to miles

To convert barleycorns to miles, multiply the number of barleycorns by 0.000005260942761. The factor is rounded to 10 significant digits. To go the other way, multiply miles by 190,080.

miles = barleycorns × 0.000005260942761

Example: 10 barleycorns = 0.00005260942761 miles.

About these units

Barleycorn (bc)

Medieval EnglishHistorical unit (no longer in standard use)

One third of an inch. A medieval English unit defined as the length of a grain of barley; the origin of the shoe-size increment.

Three dry, round grains of barley laid end to end made an inch, according to an English statute known as the Composition of Yards and Perches, dated about 1300. The idea is older still, since the Welsh Laws of Hywel Dda in the 10th century used a similar rule. A barleycorn is therefore one third of an inch, about 8.47 mm, although Wikipedia's infobox rounds it to 8.46 mm. Wiktionary describes the word simply as a compound of barley and corn, meaning grain.

Real barley kernels range from roughly 4 to 15 mm depending on the cultivar, and older sources put the average near 8.8 mm, so the grain gave a notion of size, not a precise standard. Formal standards were later set by comparison with a reference yard bar, with the barleycorn taken as 1/108 of its length. A line is a quarter of a barleycorn and a poppyseed a quarter or fifth. The unit lives on mainly in shoe sizing in some English-speaking countries, where each size step is one barleycorn.

1 barleycorn = 0.008466666667 meters (approximately).

Sources: Wikipedia: Barleycorn (unit); Wiktionary: barleycorn

Mile (mi)

US & ImperialCurrent unit

5,280 feet or 1,760 yards, exactly 1,609.344 meters. This is the statute (international) mile used on US and UK roads.

A thousand paces gave the mile its name. It descends from the Latin mille passus, the Roman mile, by way of Old English mil and Middle English myle. For centuries after Rome, miles of many lengths coexisted; a sixteenth-century Mercator map, for example, shows small, medium and large Flemish miles on a single scale bar. The English statute mile was fixed by an Act of Parliament under Elizabeth I in 1593, which declared that a mile contains eight furlongs, or 5,280 feet.

The 1959 international yard and pound agreement made that mile exactly 1,609.344 meters. A slightly longer US survey mile, about 1,609.347 meters, lingered in American land surveys and was slated for retirement from 1 January 2023. Today the mile is the road unit of the United Kingdom, the United States, Liberia and Myanmar, along with several territories such as the Bahamas, Belize, Guam and the US Virgin Islands. In Canada it survives chiefly in rail transport and horse racing.

1 mile = 1,609.344 meters (exactly).

Sources: Wikipedia: Mile; Wikipedia: Foot (unit); NIST Guide to the SI, Appendix B.8: conversion factors

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