Meters to Miles (m to mi)
1 meter equals 0.0006213711922 miles (rounded).
How to convert meters to miles
To convert meters to miles, multiply the number of meters by 0.0006213711922. The factor is rounded to 10 significant digits. To go the other way, multiply miles by 1,609.344.
miles = meters × 0.0006213711922
Example: 10 meters = 0.006213711922 miles.
About these units
Meter (m)
The SI base unit of length. Since 1983 it is defined as the distance light travels in a vacuum in 1/299,792,458 of a second.
Meter comes from the Greek metron, a measure. In 1791 the French National Assembly defined it as one ten-millionth of the distance from the equator to the North Pole along a great circle through Paris, after rejecting the length of a seconds pendulum because that length changes with local gravity. The surveyors Delambre and Méchain measured the meridian arc, and in 1799 a platinum bar known as the Mètre des Archives became the physical standard. NIST notes that this Earth-based meter turned out to be about 0.2 mm shorter than the true pole-to-equator fraction it was meant to represent.
The 1875 Treaty of the Meter created the CGPM and the BIPM to look after common standards, and in 1889 a platinum-iridium prototype bar took over; the original is still kept at the BIPM. In 1960 the meter was tied to 1,650,763.73 wavelengths of an orange-red krypton-86 line, and in 1983 to the speed of light, which made length a quantity derived from the time standard. The 2018 revision reworded that definition without changing the meter's size. NIST offers a handy yardstick for scale: a pace, meaning two steps, is roughly a meter or a yard.
The meter is the reference unit for length on this site.
Sources: BIPM: history of the metre; NIST: the meter and the SI redefinition; Wikipedia: Metre
Mile (mi)
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
Related conversions
- Miles to meters (reverse)
- Meters to kilometers
- Meters to centimeters
- Meters to millimeters
- Meters to inches
- Meters to feet
- Meters to yards
- Meters to micrometers
- Meters to nanometers
- Meters to nautical miles
- Meters to pixels (CSS)
- Meters to light-years
- Meters to picometers
- Kilometers to miles
- Centimeters to miles
- Millimeters to miles
- Inches to miles
- Feet to miles
- Yards to miles
- Micrometers to miles
- Nanometers to miles
- Nautical miles to miles
- Pixels (CSS) to miles
- Light-years to miles
- Picometers to miles
See all length units.