Liters to US Fluid Drams (L to fl dr)

1 liter equals 270.5121816 US fluid drams (rounded).

1 liter = 270.5121816 US fluid drams

How to convert liters to US fluid drams

To convert liters to US fluid drams, multiply the number of liters by 270.5121816. The factor is rounded to 10 significant digits. To go the other way, multiply US fluid drams by 0.003696691195 (rounded).

US fluid drams = liters × 270.5121816

Example: 10 liters = 2,705.121816 US fluid drams.

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

US Fluid Dram (fl dr)

US customaryTraditional unit (still used in some regions)

One eighth of a US fluid ounce (3.6967 mL). Used in old pharmacy measures.

Drachma, the Greek coin and weight, lies behind the dram. The Attic drachma weighed about 4.37 g and the Roman one about 3.41 g, and the apothecaries borrowed the name for both a weight and a liquid measure. The US fluid dram is one eighth of a US fluid ounce, 3.6966911953125 mL, and it divides into 60 minims. Its British imperial counterpart, spelled drachm in pharmacy usage from around 1900, is smaller at 3.5516 mL.

Doctors once used the dram as the size of a teaspoonful, and early nineteenth-century prescriptions assumed a teaspoon held 60 minims. By 1876 household teaspoons had grown to 80 to 85 minims, which made that shortcut unreliable for medicine. Pharmacy is now metric, but the fluid dram survives in the capacity of pill bottles and vials. In casual speech a dram of whisky is a small pour, about 25 mL in an English pub and 35 mL in Scotland, which is a different thing from the pharmacist's unit.

1 US fluid dram = 0.003696691195 liters (approximately).

Sources: Wikipedia: Fluid dram; Wikipedia: Minim (unit)

Related conversions

See all volume units.