Liters to US Cups (L to cup)
1 liter equals 4.226752838 US cups (rounded).
How to convert liters to US cups
To convert liters to US cups, multiply the number of liters by 4.226752838. The factor is rounded to 10 significant digits. To go the other way, multiply US cups by 0.2365882365.
US cups = liters × 4.226752838
Example: 10 liters = 42.26752838 US cups.
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)
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
US Cup (cup)
One sixteenth of a US gallon, 236.588 mL (8 US fluid ounces). The standard US recipe cup.
Cups began as household drinking vessels, not scientific units, which is why they remain the messiest measures in the kitchen. The US customary cup was defined by slicing up the gallon: half a pint, or eight US fluid ounces, about 236.6 milliliters. Unlike the larger units, nobody ever fixed it to a physical vessel, so it exists only as a fraction of the gallon.
The customary cup is not the only American cup. For nutrition labels, US regulation defines a cup as exactly 240 milliliters, a rounder figure that sits slightly above the customary size. Packaged foods therefore list a serving in the legal cup while a measuring cup from the hardware store follows the customary definition. The gap is 3.4 milliliters, which hardly matters for soup but can matter in baking. Cup measures also hide the weight of dry ingredients, since a cup of sifted flour and a cup of packed flour differ substantially, which is why much of the world prefers grams.
1 US cup = 0.2365882365 liters (exactly).
Sources: Wikipedia: Cup (unit); NIST SP 811, Appendix B.8: conversion factors for volume; 21 CFR 101.9: nutrition labeling household measures
Related conversions
- US cups to liters (reverse)
- Liters to milliliters
- Liters to US gallons
- Liters to US fluid ounces
- Liters to cubic meters
- Liters to cubic centimeters
- Liters to US quarts
- Liters to US pints
- Liters to US tablespoons
- Liters to US teaspoons
- Liters to metric cups
- Liters to metric tablespoons
- Liters to metric teaspoons
- Milliliters to US cups
- US gallons to US cups
- US fluid ounces to US cups
- Cubic meters to US cups
- Cubic centimeters to US cups
- US quarts to US cups
- US pints to US cups
- US tablespoons to US cups
- US teaspoons to US cups
- Metric cups to US cups
- Metric tablespoons to US cups
- Metric teaspoons to US cups
See all volume units.