US Cups to Tierces (cup to tierce)

1 US cup equals 0.001488095238 tierces (rounded).

1 US cup = 0.001488095238 tierces

How to convert US cups to tierces

To convert US cups to tierces, multiply the number of US cups by 0.001488095238. The factor is rounded to 10 significant digits. To go the other way, multiply tierces by 672.

tierces = US cups × 0.001488095238

Example: 10 US cups = 0.01488095238 tierces.

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)

US customaryCurrent unit

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

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)

Related conversions

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