free rommy New York → Kansas City → San Francisco → Stockholm → Berlin

Thanks very much for the fantastic explanation, David! Much appreciated.


Super interesting to hear the instances in which it is and isn't used and I can understand its usage in speaking of long distances, particularly in Sweden.

The "grandparents" suggestion is probably pretty close to the mark, in the sense that obviously it's something which is transmitted outside of officialdom. But since everyone uses it and since it's defined in metric terms, it's just like another metric unit. And your suggestion about Ikea is also fairly sensible - it doesn't seem too strange to say "Det är en halvmil till närmsta Ikea" but we usually use it as a very handy term for distances where we don't need very exact measures. If you Google the phrase "det är 100 mil" (as in, for instance, it's 1,000 km from Stockholm to Kiruna) you get a couple hundred hits, but if you Google "det är 1000 km" or "det är 1000 kilometer" you almost get no hits at all. But if you need to be precise, as in "it's exactly 1,574 km from Smygehuk to Treriksröset", then mils will not do. But for rough distances longer than, say, 4 km, the mil is very handy and very frequent. One can also note that a Swedish car-owner will never say "this car has gone 300,000 km" but always "30,000 mil". Indeed, almost the only more-or-less official use of "mil" is in the concept of liter/mil as a measure of the fuel consumption of a car.