Litre

The litre (British and Commonwealth spelling) or liter (American spelling) (SI symbols L and l,[1] other symbol used: ℓ) is a metric unit of volume. It is equal to 1 cubic decimetre (dm3), 1000 cubic centimetres (cm3) or 0.001 cubic metre. A cubic decimetre (or litre) occupies a volume of 10 cm × 10 cm × 10 cm (see figure) and is thus equal to one-thousandth of a cubic metre.

This article is about a common unit of volume. For the plant commonly known as litre, see Lithraea caustica.
Not to be confused with Litter or Litr.

litre
One litre is the volume of a cube with 10 cm sides
General information
Unit systemNon-SI unit accepted for use with SI
Unit ofVolume
SymbolL or l or (ℓ)[1] 
Named afterlitron
Conversions
1 L in ...... is equal to ...
   SI base unit   10−3 m3
   U.S. customary   ≈ 0.264 gallon

The original French metric system used the litre as a base unit. The word litre is derived from an older French unit, the litron, whose name came from Greek—where it was a unit of weight, not volume[2]—via Latin, and which equalled approximately 0.831 litres. The litre was also used in several subsequent versions of the metric system and is accepted for use with the SI,[3] although not an SI unit—the SI unit of volume is the cubic metre (m3). The spelling used by the International Bureau of Weights and Measures is "litre",[3] a spelling which is shared by almost all English-speaking countries. The spelling "liter" is predominantly used in American English.[lower-alpha 1]

One litre of liquid water has a mass of almost exactly one kilogram, because the kilogram was originally defined in 1795 as the mass of one cubic decimetre of water at the temperature of melting ice (0 °C). Subsequent redefinitions of the metre and kilogram mean that this relationship is no longer exact.[4]

Definition
One-litre beer mugs (German: Maßkrüge) at the 2006 Oktoberfest in Germany

A litre is a cubic decimetre, which is the volume of a cube 10 centimetres × 10 centimetres × 10 centimetres (1 L ≡ 1 dm3 ≡ 1000 cm3). Hence 1 L ≡ 0.001 m3 ≡ 1000 cm3, and 1 m3 (i.e. a cubic metre, which is the SI unit for volume) is exactly 1000 L.

From 1901 to 1964, the litre was defined as the volume of one kilogram of pure water at maximum density (+4 °C) and standard pressure. The kilogram was in turn specified as the mass of the International Prototype of the Kilogram (a specific platinum/iridium cylinder) and was intended to be of the same mass as the 1 litre of water referred to above. It was subsequently discovered that the cylinder was around 28 parts per million too large and thus, during this time, a litre was about 1.000028 dm3. Additionally, the mass–volume relationship of water (as with any fluid) depends on temperature, pressure, purity and isotopic uniformity. In 1964, the definition relating the litre to mass was superseded by the current one. Although the litre is not an SI unit, it is accepted by the CGPM (the standards body that defines the SI) for use with the SI. CGPM defines the litre and its acceptable symbols.

A litre is equal in volume to the millistere, an obsolete non-SI metric unit customarily used for dry measure.

Explanation

Litres are most commonly used for items (such as fluids and solids that can be poured) which are measured by the capacity or size of their container, whereas cubic metres (and derived units) are most commonly used for items measured either by their dimensions or their displacements. The litre is often also used in some calculated measurements, such as density (kg/L), allowing an easy comparison with the density of water.

One litre of water has a mass of almost exactly one kilogram when measured at its maximal density, which occurs at about 4 °C. It follows, therefore, that 1000th of a litre, known as one millilitre (1 mL), of water has a mass of about 1 g; 1000 litres of water has a mass of about 1000 kg (1 tonne). This relationship holds because the gram was originally defined as the mass of 1 mL of water; however, this definition was abandoned in 1799 because the density of water changes with temperature and, very slightly, with pressure.

It is now known that the density of water also depends on the isotopic ratios of the oxygen and hydrogen atoms in a particular sample. Modern measurements of Vienna Standard Mean Ocean Water, which is pure distilled water with an isotopic composition representative of the average of the world's oceans, show that it has a density of 0.999975±0.000001 kg/L at its point of maximum density (3.984 °C) under one standard atmosphere (760 Torr = 101.325 kPa) of pressure.[5]

SI prefixes applied to the litre

The litre, though not an official SI unit, may be used with SI prefixes. The most commonly used derived unit is the millilitre, defined as one-thousandth of a litre, and also often referred to by the SI derived unit name "cubic centimetre". It is a commonly used measure, especially in medicine, cooking and automotive engineering. Other units may be found in the table below, where the more often used terms are in bold. However, some authorities advise against some of them; for example, in the United States, NIST advocates using the millilitre or litre instead of the centilitre.[6] There are two international standard symbols for the litre: L and l. In the United States the former is preferred because of the risk that (in some fonts) the letter l and the digit 1 may be confused.[7]

MultipleNameSymbolsEquivalent volume SubmultipleNameSymbolsEquivalent volume
100 LlitrelLdm3cubic decimetre   
101 LdecalitredaldaL101 dm3ten cubic decimetres 10−1 LdecilitredldL102 cm3hundred cubic centimetres
102 LhectolitrehlhL102 dm3hundred cubic decimetres 10−2 LcentilitreclcL101 cm3ten cubic centimetres
103 LkilolitreklkLm3cubic metre 10−3 LmillilitremlmLcm3cubic centimetre
106 LmegalitreMlMLdam3cubic decametre, 1 million litres 10−6 LmicrolitreμlμLmm3cubic millimetre
109 LgigalitreGlGLhm3cubic hectometre 10−9 LnanolitrenlnL106 μm3million cubic micrometres
1012 LteralitreTlTLkm3cubic kilometre 10−12 LpicolitreplpL103 μm3thousand cubic micrometres
1015 LpetalitrePlPL103 km3thousand cubic kilometres 10−15 LfemtolitreflfLμm3cubic micrometre
1018 LexalitreElEL106 km3million cubic kilometres 10−18 LattolitrealaL106 nm3million cubic nanometres
1021 LzettalitreZlZLMm3cubic megametre 10−21 LzeptolitrezlzL103 nm3thousand cubic nanometres
1024 LyottalitreYlYL103 Mm3thousand cubic megametres 10−24 LyoctolitreylyLnm3cubic nanometre

Non-metric conversions
Metric
unit
 Approximate value
 Non-metric unit
 Non-metric unit
 Metric equivalency
1 L≈ 0.87987699Imperial quart1 Imperial quart≡ 1.1365225 L
1 L≈ 1.056688U.S. quarts1 U.S. quart≡ 0.946352946 L
1 L≈ 1.75975399Imperial pints1 Imperial pint≡ 0.56826125 L
1 L≈ 2.11337641U.S. pints1 U.S. pint≡ 0.473176473 L
1 L≈ 0.21996925Imperial gallon1 Imperial gallon≡ 4.54609 L
1 L≈ 0.2641720523U.S. gallon1 U.S. gallon≡ 3.785411784 L
1 L≈ 0.0353146667cubic foot1 cubic foot≡ 28.316846592 L
1 L≈ 61.023744cubic inches1 cubic inch≡ 0.016387064 L
1 L≈ 35.19508Imperial fluid ounces1 Imperial fluid ounce≡ 28.4130625 mL
1 L≈ 33.814023U.S. fluid ounces1 U.S. fluid ounce≡ 29.5735295625 mL
See also Imperial units and US customary units

Rough conversions

One litre is slightly larger than a US liquid quart and slightly less than an imperial quart or one US dry quart. A mnemonic for its volume relative to an imperial pint is "a litre of water's a pint and three quarters"; this is very close, as a litre is actually 1.75975399 pints.

A litre is the volume of a cube with sides of 10 cm, which is slightly less than a cube of sides 4 inches (one-third of a foot). One cubic foot would contain exactly 27 such cubes (four inches on each side), making one cubic foot approximately equal to 27 litres. One cubic foot has an exact volume of 28.316846592 litres, which is 4.88% higher than the 27-litre approximation.

A litre of liquid water has a mass almost exactly equal to one kilogram. An early definition of the kilogram was set as the mass of one litre of water. Because volume changes with temperature and pressure, and pressure uses units of mass, the definition of a kilogram was changed. At standard pressure, one litre of water has a mass of 0.999975 kg at 4 °C, and 0.997 kg at 25 °C.[8]

Symbol

Originally, the only symbol for the litre was l (lowercase letter L), following the SI convention that only those unit symbols that abbreviate the name of a person start with a capital letter. In many English-speaking countries, however, the most common shape of a handwritten Arabic digit 1 is just a vertical stroke; that is, it lacks the upstroke added in many other cultures. Therefore, the digit "1" may easily be confused with the letter "l". In some computer typefaces, the two characters are barely distinguishable. This caused some concern, especially in the medical community.

As a result, L (uppercase letter L) was adopted as an alternative symbol for litre in 1979. The United States National Institute of Standards and Technology now recommends the use of the uppercase letter L,[9] a practice that is also widely followed in Canada and Australia. In these countries, the symbol L is also used with prefixes, as in mL and μL, instead of the traditional ml and μl used in Europe. In the UK and Ireland, as well as the rest of Europe, lowercase l is used with prefixes, though whole litres are often written in full (so, "750 ml" on a wine bottle, but often "1 litre" on a juice carton). In 1990, the International Committee for Weights and Measures stated that it was too early to choose a single symbol for the litre.[10]

Unicode

Prior to 1979, the symbol ℓ came into common use in some countries; for example, it was recommended by South African Bureau of Standards publication M33 and Canada in the 1970s. This symbol can still be encountered occasionally in some English-speaking and European countries like Germany, and its use is ubiquitous in Japan and South Korea.

Fonts covering the CJK characters usually include not only the script small ℓ but also four precomposed characters: ㎕, ㎖, ㎗ and ㎘ for the microlitre, millilitre, decilitre and kilolitre.

Litre: Unicode characters[11]
Symbol Name Unicode number
ℓ Litre (Script Small L) U+2113
㎕ Microlitre (Square MU L) U+3395
㎖ Millilitre (Square ML) U+3396
㎗ Decilitre (Square DL) U+3397
㎘ Kilolitre (Square KL) U+3398

History

The first name of the litre was "cadil"; standards are shown at the Musée des Arts et Métiers in Paris.[12]

The litre was introduced in France in 1795 as one of the new "republican units of measurement" and defined as one cubic decimetre.[13] One litre of liquid water has a mass of almost exactly one kilogram, due to the gram being defined in 1795 as one cubic centimetre of water at the temperature of melting ice.[4] The original decimetre length was 44.344 lignes, which was revised in 1798 to 44.3296 lignes. This made the original litre 1.000974 of today's cubic decimetre. It was against this litre that the kilogram was constructed.

In 1879, the CIPM adopted the definition of the litre, with the symbol l (lowercase letter L).

In 1901, at the 3rd CGPM conference, the litre was redefined as the space occupied by 1 kg of pure water at the temperature of its maximum density (3.98 °C) under a pressure of 1 atm. This made the litre equal to about 1.000028 dm3 (earlier reference works usually put it at 1.000027 dm3).

In 1964, at the 12th CGPM conference, the original definition was reverted to, and thus the litre was once again defined in exact relation to the metre, as another name for the cubic decimetre, that is, exactly 1 dm3.[14]

In 1979, at the 16th CGPM conference, the alternative symbol L (uppercase letter L) was adopted. It also expressed a preference that in the future only one of these two symbols should be retained, but in 1990 said it was still too early to do so.[10]

Everyday usage

In spoken English, the symbol "mL" (for millilitre) can be pronounced as "mil". This can potentially cause confusion with some other measurement words such as:

  1. "mm" for millimetre, a unit of length equal to one-thousandth of a metre
  2. "mil" for thousandth of an inch
  3. "mil", a Scandinavian unit of length equal to 10 kilometres
  4. "mil", unit of angular measurement

However the context is usually sufficient hint — "mL" is a unit of volume; whereas the others are units of linear or angular measurement.

The abbreviation "cc" (for cubic centimetre, equal to a millilitre or mL) is a unit of the cgs system, which preceded the MKS system, which later evolved into the SI system. The abbreviation "cc" is still commonly used in many fields, including medical dosage and sizing for combustion engine displacement.

The microlitre (μL) has been known in the past as the lambda (λ), but this usage is now discouraged.[15] In the medical field the microlitre is sometimes abbreviated as mcL on test results.[16]

In the SI system, apart from prefixes for powers of 1000, use of the "centi" (10−2), "deci" (10−1), "deca" (10+1) and "hecto" (10+2) prefixes with litres is common. For example, in many European countries, the hectolitre is the typical unit for production and export volumes of beverages (milk, beer, soft drinks, wine, etc.) and for measuring the size of the catch and quotas for fishing boats; decilitres are common in Croatia, Switzerland and Scandinavia and often found in cookbooks, and restaurant and café menus; centilitres indicate the capacity of drinking glasses and of small bottles. In colloquial Dutch in Belgium, a "vijfentwintiger" and a "drieëndertiger" (literally "twenty-fiver" and "thirty-threer") are the common beer glasses, the corresponding bottles mention 25 cL and 33 cL. Bottles may also be 75 cL or half size at 37.5 cL for "artisanal" brews or 70 cL for wines or spirits. Cans come in 25 cL, 33 cL and 50 cL. Similarly, alcohol shots are often marked in cL in restaurant menus, typically 3 cL (1.06 imp fl oz; 1.01 US fl oz).

In countries where the metric system was adopted as the official measuring system after the SI standard was established, common usage eschews prefixes that are not powers of 1000. For example, in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, consumer beverages are labelled almost exclusively using litres and millilitres. Hectolitres sometimes appear in industry, but centilitres and decilitres are rarely, if ever, used. An exception is in pathology, where for instance blood lead level may be measured in micrograms per decilitre. Larger volumes are usually given in cubic metres (equivalent to 1 kL), or thousands or millions of cubic metres.

Although kilolitres, megalitres, and gigalitres are commonly used for measuring water consumption, reservoir capacities and river flows, for larger volumes of fluids, such as annual consumption of tap water, lorry (truck) tanks, or swimming pools, the cubic metre is the general unit. It is also generally for all volumes of a non-liquid nature.

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See also

Notes
  1. The Metric Conversion Act of 1985 gives the United States Secretary of Commerce the responsibility of interpreting or modifying the SI for use in the United States. The Secretary of Commerce delegated this authority to the Director of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) (Turner, 2008). In 2008, the NIST published the U.S. version (Taylor and Thompson, 2008a) of the English text of the eighth edition of the Bureau International des Poids et Mesures (BIPM) publication Le Système International d' Unités (SI) (BIPM, 2006). In the NIST publication, the spellings "meter", "liter" and "deka" are used rather than "metre", "litre" and "deca" as in the original BIPM English text (Taylor and Thompson, 2008a, p. iii). The Director of the NIST officially recognized this publication, together with Taylor and Thompson (2008b), as the "legal interpretation" of the SI for the United States (Turner, 2008).

References
  1. International Bureau of Weights and Measures (2006), The International System of Units (SI) (PDF) (8th ed.), p. 124, ISBN 92-822-2213-6, archived (PDF) from the original on 14 August 2017.
  2. Collins English Dictionary.
  3. Bureau International des Poids et Mesures, 2006, p. 124. ("Days" and "hours" are examples of other non-SI units that SI accepts.)
  4. "Décret relatif aux poids et aux mesures du 18 germinal an 3 (7 avril 1795)" [Weights and measures decree dated 18 Germinal, Year 3 (7 April 1795)] (in French). Association Métrodiff. 7 April 1795. Archived from the original on 17 August 2016. Retrieved 8 December 2012. Gramme, le poids absolu d'un volume d'eau pure égal au cube de la centième partie du mètre , et à la température de la glace fondante. English translation: ‘Gramme: the absolute weight of a volume of pure water equal to the cube of the hundredth part of the meter, at the temperature of melting ice.’
  5. Isotopic composition and temperature per London South Bank University’s "List of physicochemical data concerning water", density and uncertainty per NIST Standard Reference Database Number 69 (Retrieved: 2010-04-05).
  6. Kenneth Butcher, Linda Crown, Elizabeth J. Gentry (2006), The International System of Units (SI) – Conversion Factors for General Use. Archived 27 May 2010 at the Wayback Machine, NIST Special Publication 1038.
  7. A. Thompson; B. N. Taylor (4 March 2020) [First published July 2, 2009]. "Table 6. Non-SI units accepted for use with the SI by the CIPM and this Guide". National Institute of Standards and Technology. Retrieved 30 March 2020. See footnote (b).
  8. "Online water density calculator". Antoine.frostburg.edu. Retrieved 26 April 2012.
  9. Non-SI units accepted for use with the SI by the CIPM – NIST.
  10. "Bureau International des Poids et Mesures, 2006" (PDF). Retrieved 26 April 2012.
  11. Unicode Consortium (2019). "The Unicode Standard 12.0 – CJK Compatibility ❰ Range: 3300—33FF ❱" (PDF). Unicode.org. Retrieved 24 May 2019.
  12. "Visite Générale au Musée des arts et métiers" (PDF). Paris: Musée des arts et métiers. Archived from the original (PDF) on 9 November 2013. Retrieved 5 August 2013. Comment s’est appelé cet étalon de mesure avant de s’appeler le litre ? - Le Cadil [What was the name of this measurement before called being called a litre? - a Cadil].
  13. "Décret relatif aux poids et aux mesures du 18 germinal an 3 (7 avril 1795)" [Weights and measures decree dated 18 Germinal, Year 3 (7 April 1795)] (in French). Association Métrodiff. 7 April 1795. Archived from the original on 17 August 2016. Retrieved 8 December 2012. Litre, la mesure de capacité, tant pour les liquides que pour les matières sèches, dont la contenance sera celle du cube de la dixièrne partie du mètre. English translation: ‘Litre: unit of capacity for both liquids and solids which will be equivalent to a cube of [with sides] one tenth of a metre.’
  14. "NIST, 2000". Ts.nist.gov. Archived from the original on 10 December 2011. Retrieved 26 April 2012.
  15. Burtis, Carl A.; Bruns, David E. (2014). Tietz Fundamentals of Clinical Chemistry and Molecular Diagnostics (7. ed.). Elsevier Health Sciences. p. 114. ISBN 9780323292061.
  16. "Units of Measurement". Mayo Medical Laboratories. Retrieved 23 June 2017.

Bibliography
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