Tierces to Liters (tierce to L)

1 tierce equals 158.9872949 liters (rounded).

1 tierce = 158.9872949 liters

How to convert tierces to liters

To convert tierces to liters, multiply the number of tierces by 158.9872949. The factor is rounded to 10 significant digits. To go the other way, multiply liters by 0.00628981077 (rounded).

liters = tierces × 158.9872949

Example: 10 tierces = 1,589.872949 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

Tierce (tierce)

US customaryHistorical unit (no longer in standard use)

42 US gallons (159 L), a third of a tun. The size of a standard oil barrel.

Tierce is French for a third, and the cask earned the name as a third of a wine pipe, holding 42 wine gallons. Wikipedia credits a definition under Richard III with fixing the wine tierce at that size, and by around 1700 it was a standard shipping container for many goods in the English colonies, not only wine.

Its best known afterlife is in the oil fields. Pennsylvania producers, who started after the Drake well of 1859, first used whatever barrels they could find, including 40 and 45 gallon ones. Around 1866 they settled on the wine tierce, two gallons larger than a standard whisky barrel, and the 42 gallon figure was formally standardised by 1872 and adopted by federal agencies in 1882.

In US gallons the tierce is about 159 litres (158.99 L as used here), and the imperial equivalent of 35 gallons is nearly identical at 159.1 litres. That coincidence is why the unit lives on in the oil barrel, still quoted in petroleum markets even though no one ships crude in wooden casks of that size.

1 tierce = 158.9872949 liters (approximately).

Sources: Wikipedia: Barrel (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

Related conversions

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