Liters to Shō (L to shō)

1 liter equals 0.5543523532 shō (rounded).

1 liter = 0.5543523532 shō

How to convert liters to shō

To convert liters to shō, multiply the number of liters by 0.5543523532. The factor is rounded to 10 significant digits. To go the other way, multiply shō by 1.803906837 (rounded).

shō = liters × 0.5543523532

Example: 10 liters = 5.543523532 shō.

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

Shō (shō)

JapaneseTraditional unit (still used in some regions)

Exactly 2401/1331 liters, about 1.8039 L. Sake bottles still come in 1.8 L 'isshō-bin' sizes.

The character for shō depicts a ladle holding grain, and the measure began as roughly the amount held in two cupped hands, about 200 mL. Over the centuries the unit grew to about ten times that, and by the Edo period the standard box (masu) was the one used in Kyoto.

In 1669 the shogunate abolished the older Edo masu and ordered the slightly larger new Kyoto masu to be used everywhere. Guilds in Edo and Kyoto policed its size for roughly three centuries. The 1891 Weights and Measures Act then fixed the shō at 2401/1331 L, about 1.804 L, derived from the 64,827 cubic bu of that box.

Japanese sake is still sold in 1.8 L bottles known as isshō-bin, or one-shō bottles. Trade use of the shō was banned in 1959. Note that in China the shō is defined as exactly one litre, so the same word names a different size there.

1 shō = 1.803906837 liters (approximately).

Sources: Wikipedia: Japanese units of measurement; Japanese Wikipedia: Sho

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