The yard is a unit of length in the imperial and US system and uses the symbol yd.
A yard is equal to 3 ft or 36 inches. There is 0.9144 m in a yard. There are 1760 yards in a mile.
Derived from the Old English 'gyrd' or 'gerd', the yard was first defined in the late 1600s laws of Ine of Wessex where a "yard of land" (yardland) was an old unit of tax assessment by the government.
The yard was the original standard adpoted by early English leaders and was apparently used in length by the Saxon race and represented the breadth of the chest of a man. After a relative hiatus, Queen Elizabeth reintroduced the yard as the English standard of measure, and it still survives in many 2nd generation conversations today.
The mile is a unit of length in the imperial unit system with the symbol mi.
It was originally an English unit but was adopted by many countries who all had their own slight variation on definition. The English mile, however, is equal to 63,360 inches, 5280 ft or 1760 yards.
The UK still uses the mile on all roadway signs rather than the kilometre; its SI "equivalent". It used to have the symbol 'm' until SI was established and it was changed to avoid confusion with the unit metre.