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The unit used for distance depends on the scale of distance being measured and the system of units the measurement is taken in.

In the Imperial System (sometimes called the Standard system), some common units for distance are the inch, the foot, the yard, and the mile. Less commonly used are chains, leagues, fathoms, and hands. The foot is nominally the basic unit of this system, as most derived units (such as mass, work, and energy) are calculated in terms of feet. This system of measurement is rarely used outside the United States, the United Kingdom, and some Commonwealth countries. The foot is defined as 12 inches, where inches are defined as the distance light travels in 1/11,802,829,071.46 of a second.

In the International System (sometimes called the metric system, or the SI [from the French Système international d'unités]), the basic unit for distance is the meter. Various prefixes can be used to denote different orders of magnitude. For instance, a millimeter is 1/1000 of long a meter, while a kilometers is 1000 times as long as a meter. The meter is defined as the distance light travels in 1/299,792,458 of a second.

There are also a few units of astronomical distance. The light year (the distance light travels in one mean solar year) and the parsec (the distance to an object with a parallax angle of one arc second [1/3600 of a degree]) are two common units for astronomical distance.

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