Scandinavian Mil to Meters (mil to m)

1 Scandinavian mil equals 10,000 meters exactly.

1 Scandinavian mil = 10,000 meters

How to convert Scandinavian mil to meters

To convert Scandinavian mil to meters, multiply the number of Scandinavian mil by 10,000. This factor is exact. To go the other way, multiply meters by 0.0001.

meters = Scandinavian mil × 10,000

Example: 10 Scandinavian mil = 100,000 meters.

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

Meter (m)

Metric (SI)Current unit

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

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