A league is a unit of distance that used to be more useful. It's the distance one could walk in an hour, reckoned to be about three miles.
Similarly, a league in a nautical context is the distance one can see from the deck of a boat and about equal to three nautical miles.
A nautical mile, then, is about 1 arc minute of latitude, or 6076 ft. This is about 15% longer than a regular mile.
The name "mile" comes from the Latin word millia which means thousand, as in a thousand paces. Isn't that more satisfying than the awkward 5280 ft? A mile is also an even 8 furlongs.
The name furlong is just "furrow long" rendered in Old English. It's the fairly standard length of a plowed furrow. It turns out that a square one furlong on each side is ten acres.
Acre is Old English for "open field", and is about the area that can be plowed with a pair of oxen in one day. Picture a football field excluding endzones and sidelines. It's an area one furlong by one chain.
A chain is a length taken from an actual chain a clergyman named Gunter used for measuring land. It had 100 links and was the length of four rods.
A rod is about 16.5 ft. People who did a lot of measuring for engineering or land surveying would have an actual metal rod of that length to use for their standard.
This was more rigourous than the ancient cubit. The word comes from the Latin word cubitum for "elbow" and the length was the distance along one's forearm from the elbow to the tip of the middle finger, about two spans.
A span is the distance from the tip of one's thumb to the tip of one's pinkie finger with the fingers spread wide, approximately 9 inches.
The inch has, at one point, been defined as the length of three grains of barley laid end to end, but the word "inch" is from the Latin word uncia for one twelfth part because it was (and now is again) one twelfth of a foot.
The foot is, guess what, about the length of a person's foot.
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