Liters to Tō (L to tō)

1 liter equals 0.05543523532 tō (rounded).

1 liter = 0.05543523532 tō

How to convert liters to tō

To convert liters to tō, multiply the number of liters by 0.05543523532. The factor is rounded to 10 significant digits. To go the other way, multiply tō by 18.03906837 (rounded).

tō = liters × 0.05543523532

Example: 10 liters = 0.5543523532 tō.

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

Tō (tō)

JapaneseTraditional unit (still used in some regions)

Ten shō, about 18.039 L.

With ten shō to the tō, this is the largest of the three grain and liquor measures of the Japanese system, equal to 24,010/1331 L, about 18.04 L, the figure used here. That is close to 4.77 US gallons, enough to fill a large barrel-sized pail.

It sits at the top of a chain that runs 10 gō to 1 shō and 10 shō to 1 tō, a purely decimal ladder, unlike many traditional systems.

Japan's 1891 law fixed the measure exactly by tying it to the new Kyoto masu standard. That standard dated from the Edo period, when the shogunate chose the new Kyoto masu in 1669, and the law simply converted it to metric terms. The tō lost legal status in trade after the 1959 Measurement Act.

1 tō = 18.03906837 liters (approximately).

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

Related conversions

See all volume units.