Australian Tablespoons to Liters (tbsp (AU) to L)

1 Australian tablespoon equals 0.02 liters exactly.

1 Australian tablespoon = 0.02 liters

How to convert Australian tablespoons to liters

To convert Australian tablespoons to liters, multiply the number of Australian tablespoons by 0.02. This factor is exact. To go the other way, multiply liters by 50.

liters = Australian tablespoons × 0.02

Example: 10 Australian tablespoons = 0.2 liters.

Pints, quarts, gallons and fluid ounces differ between the US and the UK. Units are labeled 'US' or 'imperial' to avoid confusion.

About these units

Australian Tablespoon (tbsp (AU))

Cooking & barCurrent unit

Exactly 20 mL, which makes it larger than the 15 mL tablespoon used in the US and UK.

Australia is the odd one out among tablespoon sizes. Wikipedia reports that the Metric Conversion Board promulgated a 20 mL definition in the 1970s as part of metrication, and calls it the Australian official definition. That is about 1 and a third of the 15 mL international metric tablespoon, and exactly four metric teaspoons of 5 mL each.

Elsewhere the spoon is smaller. The common UK and US definitions are both exactly 15 mL, while the older customary spoons were half a fluid ounce, about 14.2 mL in Britain and 14.8 mL in the United States. The extra volume matters to a cook following an Australian recipe abroad, where the same tablespoon of liquid ingredients would come up a quarter short. The figure used here is exactly 0.02 liter, and Wikipedia's article is tagged as needing more citations.

1 Australian tablespoon = 0.02 liters (exactly).

Sources: Wikipedia: Tablespoon; NIST SP 811 Appendix B.8

Liter (L)

Metric (SI)Current unit

One cubic decimeter (1,000 cm³). The everyday metric unit of volume for drinks, fuel and cooking.

The liter was born in revolutionary France. In 1795 it was introduced as a republican unit and defined as one cubic decimeter, while the gram was tied to a cubic centimeter of water. The name comes from the older French litron, itself descended from a Byzantine Greek unit of weight, not volume. A small revision of the decimeter in 1798 left the first liter about 1.000974 of today's cubic decimeter, and in 1879 the international metric authorities adopted the liter with the symbol l.

The liter then took a strange detour. In 1901 it was redefined as the space taken up by one kilogram of pure water at its densest, which made it about 1.000028 cubic decimeters, and that muddled definition lasted until 1964, when it was restored to exactly one cubic decimeter. A capital L was added as an alternative symbol in 1979 because a lowercase l is easy to mistake for the digit 1, and NIST says L is the symbol to use in the United States. A liter of water is close to a kilogram, which is why a one-liter bottle feels like a kilo in the hand.

The liter is the reference unit for volume on this site.

Sources: Wikipedia: Litre; NIST Guide to the SI, Chapter 5: units outside the SI

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