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Scandinavian mile

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Scandinavian mile

A Scandinavian mile (Norwegian and Swedish: mil, [miːl], Finnish: peninkulma) is a unit of length common in Norway and Sweden, to a lesser extent in Finland, but not Denmark. Today, it is standardised as 1 mil being 10 kilometres (6.2 miles), but it had different values in the past.

The word is derived from the same Roman source as the English mile. In Norway and Sweden, the international mile is formally called "English mile" (engelsk mil), although it is sometimes just referred to by the English word mile. However, in situations where confusion may arise it is more common for Scandinavians to describe distances in terms of the official SI unit kilometre.

This modern definition of 10 kilometres (km) is equivalent to the obsolete myriametre, which was once used in France.

The Danish mile was defined as 7,532.4 m (24,713 ft), equivalent to 4 minutes of latitude. It is no longer in use.

In early history, Sweden had various regional miles with their own measurements. Later on, such miles were generally defined by county (Swedish: landskapsmil, "county miles"). Some noteworthy county miles are:

In 1649 the Swedish government made the Uppland mile the de facto Swedish mile, or "unit mile" (enhetsmil), for all of Sweden, also known as "land mile" or "long mile". It could be divided into four "quarter ways" (fjärdingsväg, "firkin way"), describing a quarter of a unit mile.

Old regional miles still persisted across Sweden in the 18th century and regional variations of rod, fathom, ell and foot also caused regional variation to the unit mile. This became apparent with the Swedish-Norwegian union in 1814, were the different definitions of foot in made the unit mile 11,295 m (37,057 ft) in Norway.

When the metric system was introduced, the mil was redefined to be exactly 10 km (6.2 mi). The metric system was introduced in Norway in 1875 and Sweden in 1889, after a decision by the parliament in 1876 and a ten-year transition period from 1879.

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