US Cups to Cubic Millimeters (cup to mm³)
1 US cup equals 236,588.2365 cubic millimeters exactly.
How to convert US cups to cubic millimeters
To convert US cups to cubic millimeters, multiply the number of US cups by 236,588.2365. This factor is exact. To go the other way, multiply cubic millimeters by 0.000004226752838 (rounded).
cubic millimeters = US cups × 236,588.2365
Example: 10 US cups = 2,365,882.365 cubic millimeters.
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
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
Cubic Millimeter (mm³)
One thousandth of a milliliter. Used for tiny volumes.
Geometry supplies the name: a cubic millimeter is the volume of a cube whose edges are each one millimeter long, equal to 10 to the minus 9 cubic meters. Because 1,000 of them fill one cubic centimeter, it is one thousandth of a milliliter, and it is the smallest volume that is commonly written as a cube of length rather than with a liter prefix.
Its tidy equality with the microliter rests on a decision taken in 1964, when the 12th General Conference on Weights and Measures went back to the original definition of the liter as exactly one cubic decimeter. From 1901 until then the liter had been tied to the space taken by a kilogram of water, which made it about 1.000028 cubic decimeters, so volumes in cubic millimeters and microliters differed very slightly. Today 1 mm3 equals 1 microliter exactly, and the figure used here, 0.000001 liter, follows directly from that.
1 cubic millimeter = 0.000001 liters (exactly).
Sources: Wikipedia: Cubic metre; Wikipedia: Litre
Related conversions
- Cubic millimeters to US cups (reverse)
- US cups to liters
- US cups to milliliters
- US cups to US gallons
- US cups to US fluid ounces
- US cups to cubic meters
- US cups to cubic centimeters
- US cups to US quarts
- US cups to US pints
- US cups to US tablespoons
- US cups to US teaspoons
- US cups to metric cups
- US cups to metric tablespoons
- Liters to cubic millimeters
- Milliliters to cubic millimeters
- US gallons to cubic millimeters
- US fluid ounces to cubic millimeters
See all volume units.