What is a mile?
A mile is an imperial and US unit of length, exactly 1,609.344 meters. The word comes from the Latin mille passus, 'a thousand paces', where a pace was two steps of a marching legionary.
A mile is equivalent to 1760yds or 5280ft.
Road distances in the US and UK are signed in miles, while nearly every other country uses kilometers. Aviation and shipping use the nautical mile instead, which is a different length (1,852 meters).
What is a centimeter?
A centimeter (cm) is one hundredth of a meter and just under four tenths of an inch (0.3937 inches). The prefix comes from the Latin centum, a hundred.
Divide centimeters by 30.48 to get feet, or multiply feet by 30.48 to get centimeters. The factor is exact, as a foot is 30.48cm, and a single centimeter is about 0.0328 feet.
The centimeter was the base unit of length in the CGS (centimeter, gram, second) system that physicists used before SI, which is why older physics talks about dynes and ergs.
How do you convert miles to centimeters?
There are exactly 160,934.4 cm in a mile, so multiply by that. It comes from a mile being 1,609.344 m and each metre being 100 cm.
3 miles is 482,803.2 cm. A 10 km race is 1,000,000 cm, or about 6.21 miles – at this scale the centimetre figure stops meaning much to anyone.
For a rough check, 1 mile is about 160,000 cm, roughly 0.6% low.