US Pints to Liters (pt to L)

1 US pint equals 0.473176473 liters exactly.

1 US pint = 0.473176473 liters

How to convert US pints to liters

To convert US pints to liters, multiply the number of US pints by 0.473176473. This factor is exact. To go the other way, multiply liters by 2.113376419 (rounded).

liters = US pints × 0.473176473

Example: 10 US pints = 4.73176473 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

US Pint (pt)

US customaryCurrent unit

One eighth of a US gallon, 473.176 mL (16 US fluid ounces). The US pint is about 17% smaller than the imperial pint.

Pint seems to come from Old French pinte, possibly from a Latin word meaning painted, perhaps because capacity marks were painted on containers. British North America inherited the 231-cubic-inch wine gallon around 1707, and the US liquid pint was derived from it as one eighth. After Britain adopted the imperial gallon in 1824, American and British pints parted ways for good.

Today the US liquid pint is exactly 28.875 cubic inches, or 473.176473 milliliters. The imperial pint, at 568.26125 mL, is about 20 percent larger. That is why a pint of beer in an American bar is a lesser drink than a pint in an English pub, and why recipes from different countries cannot swap pints blindly. In the US a pint is a common size for ice cream, cream and craft beer, and a separate US dry pint of about 550.6 milliliters measures blueberries and cherry tomatoes.

1 US pint = 0.473176473 liters (exactly).

Sources: Wikipedia: Pint; NIST SP 811, Appendix B.8: conversion factors for volume

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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