Scandinavian Mil to Kilometers (mil to km)

1 Scandinavian mil equals 10 kilometers exactly.

1 Scandinavian mil = 10 kilometers

How to convert Scandinavian mil to kilometers

To convert Scandinavian mil to kilometers, multiply the number of Scandinavian mil by 10. This factor is exact. To go the other way, multiply kilometers by 0.1.

kilometers = Scandinavian mil × 10

Example: 10 Scandinavian mil = 100 kilometers.

About these units

Scandinavian Mil (mil)

ScandinavianTraditional unit (still used in some regions)

Exactly 10 kilometers. Sweden and Norway still quote car distances and fuel consumption in 'mil' (not to be confused with the 'mil' for a thousandth of an inch).

Swedes and Norwegians still say that a town is a few mil away, and the word comes from the same Roman source as the English mile. Today one mil is exactly 10 kilometers, a figure Norway fixed when it adopted the metric system in 1875 and Sweden followed in 1889. Finland redefined its own peninkulma as 10 kilometers in 1887.

The older mil was far less tidy. In 1649 Sweden made the Uppland mile, about 10,688.5 meters, its unit mile, though counties kept their own, such as 14,485 meters in Dalarna. After the 1814 union, Norway's mil worked out at about 11,295 meters. Denmark used a shorter one of 7,532.4 meters, standardized in 1683 by Ole Rømer and equal to four minutes of latitude.

Road signs use kilometers, but speech does not. Five kilometers is half a mil, used-car adverts quote odometer readings in mil, and the Swedish Tax Agency counts some deductions in them.

1 Scandinavian mil = 10,000 meters (exactly).

Sources: Wikipedia: Scandinavian mile; Wikipedia: Ole Rømer

Kilometer (km)

Metric (SI)Current unit

1,000 meters. The standard unit for road distances in most countries.

A name for 1,000 meters took a while to settle. In 1793 France's National Convention made the metre the sole French unit of length, and the first proposed name for the thousand-metre multiple was millaire. Everyday French usage then leaned on the myriametre, 10,000 meters, well into the 1800s. The Netherlands adopted the kilometre in 1817, under the local name mijl, and made it the only official unit of that size in 1867. In 1935 the CIPM dropped the myria- prefix, which left the kilometre as the standard unit for road-scale distances.

Kilo- is the SI prefix for a thousand, and the kilometre is now the preferred unit for land distances in most of the world, with the United States, the United Kingdom and Liberia among those that still use the mile. One kilometre is about 0.621 mile. The main span of Lisbon's 25 de Abril Bridge, at 1.013 km, gives a sense of the scale. Even its pronunciation has been argued over: in 1970 Australia's Metric Conversion Board made stress on the first syllable official, although Prime Minister Gough Whitlam argued for stress on the second. Military slang in several countries calls it a klick.

1 kilometer = 1,000 meters (exactly).

Sources: Wikipedia: Kilometre; Wikipedia: Metric prefix; BIPM: history of the metre

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