: a metric unit of length equal to 1000 meters see Metric System Table
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A kilometer is equal to about 62/100 of a mile, and a mile is equal to about 1.61 kilometers. The U.S. has been slow to adopt metric measures, which are used almost everywhere else in the world. Though our car speedometers are often marked in both miles and kilometers, the U.S. and Great Britain are practically the only developed nations that still show miles rather than kilometers on their road signs. But even in the U.S., footraces are usually measured in meters or kilometers, like the Olympic races. Runners normally abbreviate kilometer to K: "a 5K race" (3.1 miles), "the 10K run" (6.2 miles), and so on.
Example Sentences
Recent Examples on the WebAccording to European Environment Agency data, rail travel emits one-tenth fewer carbon emissions per kilometer traveled than air travel. David Nikel, Forbes, 14 Aug. 2022 Sub-Saharan Africa has fewer than a quarter of the average paved roads per kilometer of all low-income regions. Tommy O'callaghan, CNN, 20 July 2022 But exceptionally high ice loss this year has brought him to this 15-square-kilometer (5.8-square-mile) amphitheatre of ice two months early for emergency maintenance work. Reuters, NBC News, 26 July 2022 The same story is written in ruins and sediment at other archaeological sites along a several-hundred-kilometer stretch of the Atacama coastline. Kiona N. Smith, Ars Technica, 7 Apr. 2022 Fire crews working a 10 1/2-square-mile (27-square-kilometer) wildfire that destroyed 16 homes and damaged five others turned their attention Tuesday toward hot spots inside the fire footprint, officials said.BostonGlobe.com, 27 July 2022 The volcano and its kilometer wide crater are also very much present and correct in the movie, not to mention playing a critical part in the film’s climax. Ollie Barder, Forbes, 7 June 2022 As so often in this year’s race, the two were in a class of their own and were left dueling in the brutal final kilometer up to Peyragudes airstrip.San Francisco Chronicle, 20 July 2022 Earlier this year, a study by Daniel Reck and Kay Axhausen at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich concluded that, on average, a shared escooter creates 51 more grams of CO2 per kilometer than the means of transport it’s replacing.Wired, 8 July 2022 See More