Liters to Microliters (L to µL)

1 liter equals 1,000,000 microliters exactly.

1 liter = 1,000,000 microliters

How to convert liters to microliters

To convert liters to microliters, multiply the number of liters by 1,000,000. This factor is exact. To go the other way, multiply microliters by 0.000001.

microliters = liters × 1,000,000

Example: 10 liters = 10,000,000 microliters.

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

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

Microliter (µL)

Metric (SI)Current unit

One millionth of a liter, equal to one cubic millimeter. Used for very small liquid volumes.

Older laboratory papers often call this volume a lambda, written with the Greek letter, and that name has been discouraged since 2014 in favor of the microliter. The prefix micro, meaning one millionth, entered the metric prefix list in 1873, when the symbol mu was eventually chosen because the capital M was already taken by mega. The unit therefore combines a nineteenth-century prefix with the liter.

One microliter is 10 to the minus 6 liter, which is the same volume as one cubic millimeter and one thousandth of a milliliter. Some medical test results print it as mcL instead of using the Greek letter. Small volumes like this matter wherever tiny samples are pipetted or reported, and the figure used here is exactly 0.000001 liter.

1 microliter = 0.000001 liters (exactly).

Sources: Wikipedia: Litre; Wikipedia: Metric prefix

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