Butts (pipe) to Liters (butt to L)

1 butt (pipe) equals 476.9618848 liters (rounded).

1 butt (pipe) = 476.9618848 liters

How to convert butts (pipe) to liters

To convert butts (pipe) to liters, multiply the number of butts (pipe) by 476.9618848. The factor is rounded to 10 significant digits. To go the other way, multiply liters by 0.00209660359 (rounded).

liters = butts (pipe) × 476.9618848

Example: 10 butts (pipe) = 4,769.618848 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

Butt (pipe) (butt)

US customaryHistorical unit (no longer in standard use)

126 US gallons (477 L), also called a pipe: half a tun.

Butt is an obsolete English liquid measure equal to two hogsheads, and for wine it is also called a pipe. At 126 US wine gallons, or 105 imperial gallons, it holds about 477 litres (476.96 L as used here). It is half a tun, so two butts fill the largest standard cask.

The size was never fully fixed. Depending on the definition a butt ranged from about 450 to 1,060 litres, and an ale butt of roughly 108 imperial gallons (about 491 litres) differed from the wine butt. The Oxford English Dictionary is cited as warning that these standards were not always followed precisely.

The informal word buttload, meaning a large quantity, is one proposed descendant of the measure. A 1695 gauging manual by James Lightbody lists beer and ale vessels by name and content.

1 butt (pipe) = 476.9618848 liters (approximately).

Sources: Wikipedia: Butt (unit); Wikipedia: Tun (unit)

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

Related conversions

See all volume units.