Li

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A traditional Chinese unit of distance equal to roughly half a kilometre or about a third of a mile
2. An old Chinese measure of length, roughly one-third of a mile, used for measuring journeys across land
3. A distance unit from traditional China, about 500 metres, historically used to measure travel between places

Etymology: The spelling "li" covers two unrelated things. One is a Korean unit of distance, borrowed from the Chinese character 里, which also means "distance." Older romanizations of Korean wrote the unit this way, and the Yale romanization of Korean gives the same spelling. In music, "li" is a syllable altered from "la," with the vowel changed to mark a raised note. The change of vowel is the only difference from the word it came from, so the musical syllable is a small, deliberate modification of an existing one.