kilometer
noun
How do you pronounce kilometer?: Usage Guide
In North American speech kilometer is most often pronounced with primary stress on the second syllable. This pronunciation is also heard frequently in British speech. Those who object to second syllable stress say that the first syllable should be stressed in accord with the stress patterns of centimeter, millimeter, etc. However, the pronunciation of kilometer does not parallel that of other metric compounds. From 1828 to 1841 Noah Webster indicated only second syllable stress, and his successor added a first syllable stress variant in the first Merriam-Webster dictionary of 1847. Thus, both pronunciations are venerable. Most scientists use second syllable stress, although first syllable stress seems to occur with a higher rate of frequency among scientists than among nonscientists.
Did you know?
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.
Examples of kilometer in a Sentence
Jijo Malayil, Interesting Engineering, 16 Nov. 2025
The 3,175-pound (1,440 kilograms) satellite will then make its way to its science orbit, which lies 830 miles (1,336 kilometers) above Earth.
—Mike Wall, Space.com, 16 Nov. 2025
Russian troops are now about 90 kilometers (55 miles) from the regional capital, the city of Zaporizhzhia, and within 10 kilometers of the town of Huliaipole, whose capture has been a long-standing goal for Moscow.
—Tim Lister, CNN Money, 15 Nov. 2025
Called the Willow Palisade, this was a seven-hundred-kilometer-long double wall, planted in northeast China in the middle of the seventeenth century by the Qing dynasty to demarcate the southern extent of their homeland.
—Literary Hub, 14 Nov. 2025
See All Example Sentences for kilometer
Cite this Entry
“Kilometer.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/kilometer. Accessed 20 Nov. 2025.
Copy CitationKids Definition
kilometer
noun
kil-ˈäm-
Medical Definition
kilometer
noun
Share