US Teaspoons to Liters (tsp to L)

1 US teaspoon equals 0.004928921594 liters (rounded).

1 US teaspoon = 0.004928921594 liters

How to convert US teaspoons to liters

To convert US teaspoons to liters, multiply the number of US teaspoons by 0.004928921594. The factor is rounded to 10 significant digits. To go the other way, multiply liters by 202.8841362 (rounded).

liters = US teaspoons × 0.004928921594

Example: 10 US teaspoons = 0.04928921594 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 Teaspoon (tsp)

US customaryCurrent unit

One sixth of a US fluid ounce, exactly 4.92892159375 mL. Commonly rounded to 5 mL in recipes.

Teaspoons arrived with tea. Small spoons were common in Europe from at least the 13th century, and the earliest cited mention of a teaspoon is a London Gazette advertisement from 27 December 1686. Britain's Commutation Act of 1784 cut the tea tax from 119 percent to 12.5 percent, tea became cheap, and cups and spoons grew with it. By the 1850s the culinary teaspoon had settled as one third of a tablespoon.

The US teaspoon is one sixth of a US fluid ounce, exactly 4.92892159375 milliliters, though for nutrition labels and medicine it is rounded to 5 mL. Apothecaries once called the small spoon cochleare minus, to distinguish it from the larger cochleare majus. Household spoons are poor measuring tools: one study of 71 kitchen teaspoons found volumes from 2.5 to 7.3 milliliters, which is why dosing instructions point to standard measuring spoons or syringes.

1 US teaspoon = 0.004928921594 liters (approximately).

Sources: Wikipedia: Teaspoon; NIST SP 811, Appendix B.8: conversion factors for volume; 21 CFR 101.9: nutrition labeling household measures

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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