Puncheons to Liters (pun to L)

1 puncheon equals 317.9745899 liters (rounded).

1 puncheon = 317.9745899 liters

How to convert puncheons to liters

To convert puncheons to liters, multiply the number of puncheons by 317.9745899. The factor is rounded to 10 significant digits. To go the other way, multiply liters by 0.003144905385 (rounded).

liters = puncheons × 317.9745899

Example: 10 puncheons = 3,179.745899 liters.

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

Puncheon (pun)

US customaryHistorical unit (no longer in standard use)

84 US gallons (318 L), two tierces. A cask for rum and wine.

Richard III is named as having set the wine puncheon at 84 gallons, a size that works out to about 318 litres (317.97 L as used here) in US wine gallons, or 70 imperial gallons. Wikipedia notes the US puncheon is four thirds of a hogshead, so it also equals two tierces.

Unlike the neat wine figure, the puncheon was a loose term in practice. British usage for beer, wine and spirits placed it anywhere between 70 and 120 imperial gallons, roughly 318 to 546 litres, so a puncheon of rum could be markedly larger than one of wine. Any stated size therefore depends on the trade and the period.

Within the English wine ladder it falls between the 63 gallon hogshead and the 126 gallon butt, a third of a tun. The ratios are exact in US gallons: it equals two tierces and four thirds of a hogshead.

1 puncheon = 317.9745899 liters (approximately).

Sources: Wikipedia: Puncheon (unit); Wikipedia: Tun (unit)

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

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