What’s the origin of the phrase a country mile? Vida from Rochester, New York, says her husband often uses it, as in “go about a country mile and then make a left.” The expression goes back at least 300 years in the United Kingdom and has long meant “an approximate distance.” Bumpy, unpaved, curvy roads out in the countryside may make a real mile feel much longer. Variants include Irish mile, Welsh mile, Scots mile, and Kentish mile. The idiom often turns up in baseball, where announcers exaggerate the distance by saying a ball was hit a country mile or a pitch missed by a country mile. The word mile itself comes from Latin for “one thousand,” suggesting the measure of “a thousand paces.” This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “What “A Country Mile” Means: An Approximate Distance, Not a Precise Measure”
Hello.
You have A Way with Words.
Hi.
Hi.
This is Vida from Rochester, New York.
Hey, Vida.
Welcome to the show.
What can we do for you today?
My husband keeps using the expression a country mile, and it…
He uses it so frequently that I thought, oh my god.
I gotta find the origin of that expression.
You know?’
Cause it’s been around for a long time, and I’ve heard people use it.
And I think it just means, like, a long ways.
But, you know, I’m just curious as to the origin of it.
So if he’s giving someone directions, he might say, oh, yeah.
Go about a country mile and then make a left.
Yep.
Yep.
That’s it.
That’s it.
Yeah.
This one’s got a long history.
This goes back at least three hundred years to The United Kingdom.
And it’s almost always been this approximate distance, you know.
And it and it comes from a couple different things.
One is because we don’t, you know, we don’t actually measure distances all that often.
Right?
We don’t always know exactly how far something is to the to the inch or to the foot.
And so we estimate.
But the one interesting notion here is that a country mile is a little longer even if it is an actual mile because it takes you longer to drive it because the roads are bumpier.
Maybe they’re unpaved or they’re…
They go…
They’re more…
They’re curvier.
You know?
Katja Road maybe isn’t as sleek in a straight as a as a city road.
Yeah.
I was gonna say I spent the week in Southeast England earlier this year.
And I would look at the map and, you know, it’d say this town is miles away, but the roads are so curvy that, you know, half an hour later, we’re still driving to this town.
Right.
It’s 10 miles away.
And there were lots of variations on this, Vija.
I don’t know if you or your husband know these, but sometimes you’ll hear an Irish mile or a Welsh mile and now…
Or a Scotts mile.
But what’s interesting with these is sometimes the confusion about what a mile is is because there were different standards of measurement.
Like back in the day, English had one distance that was a mile, the Irish had another, and the Scots had a third.
And so, know, it was kind of like, which mile are we talking about?
Who knows?
You know, it’s a country mile.
It’s somewhere in the mix of the three of these distances is how far it is.
Although, there other ones, like I think the Welsh Mile was just a vague distance like a country mile as well.
There’s a Kentish Mile named after the County Of Kent.
So a lot of different of these approximate distances.
But let me ask you, do you or your husband follow baseball at all?
Baseball?
Yeah.
No.
‘ Cause it’s a favorite of baseball announcers.
They’ll talk about, yeah.
He hit that a country mile.
Up it goes.
That’s a home run or whatever.
But they’ll talk about a ball that goes very far, but they’ll talk about it going a country mile.
Or they’ll say things like missed by a country mile or that, you know, that pitch wasn’t within a country mile of the plate.
So sometimes it’s about exaggerating a distance to make it seem more extreme than it is.
-huh.
I I I guess that would be my understanding that it would be an exaggeration of distance.
Okay.
But it’s it’s such a common expression.
You know, people will use it frequently.
And it’s like, where’d that come from?
You know, my girlfriend is sitting next to me.
Yeah.
She has a question.
Can she ask?
Yeah.
Sure.
Fire away.
Hi.
I’m Stephanie from Georgia, and I’m up here visiting because I used to live up here, and I’m here for a week.
But you keep talking about the word mile.
I don’t know where that actually came from because United Kingdom is in kilometers.
And when I’ve been there at the driving, it’s always kilometers and yet you’re talking about the word mile, which I always thought was an American word and not an English word even though we’re basically from there.
Oh, you know, it’s in the English system or it used to be, but they joined the entire rest of the world except for The US and adopting the metric system.
We are stuck in our old fashioned ways in this country.
So they they still talk about miles in England even though they use kilometers.
They’ll still…
Certainly in colloquial expressions, but before it entered into English, was a Latin word, meaning thousand and it referred to a Roman measurement of a thousand paces.
So it’s it’s gone quite the distance from from from Rome to London to to The United States.
Several country miles.
It sure is.
That makes a lot of sense.
It does make a lot of sense.
Well, Stephanie, enjoy your time there.
I know that’s a beautiful country.
And, Vita, thank you so much for your question.
We really appreciate it.
Ok.
Thank you.
Thank you for selling the mystery.
Mhmm.
Bye-bye.
Take care.
You can send us a text or leave us a voice mail anytime.
