Drams to Kilograms (dr to kg)

1 dram equals 0.001771845195 kilograms (rounded).

1 dram = 0.001771845195 kilograms

How to convert drams to kilograms

To convert drams to kilograms, multiply the number of drams by 0.001771845195. The factor is rounded to 10 significant digits. To go the other way, multiply kilograms by 564.3833912 (rounded).

kilograms = drams × 0.001771845195

Example: 10 drams = 0.01771845195 kilograms.

About these units

Dram (dr)

US & ImperialTraditional unit (still used in some regions)

One sixteenth of an ounce (1.7718 g). Used mainly for small quantities of powder.

Greek coinage lies behind this small weight: dram is a form of drachma, a coin that was also a unit of mass in ancient Greece. An Attic drachma weighed about 4.37 grams and a Roman one about 3.41 grams. The avoirdupois dram is smaller than both, one sixteenth of an ounce or one 256th of a pound, which is exactly 1.7718451953125 grams, or about 27.34 grains.

A different dram existed in medicine. The apothecaries' dram is an eighth of an apothecaries' ounce and equals 60 grains, or exactly 3.8879346 grams, and it was common in American pharmacy until the mid-twentieth century. After Britain's Weights and Measures Act 1878 the spellings split by about 1900, with dram for the avoirdupois unit and drachm for the apothecaries' one. Today the avoirdupois dram survives mainly in shotgun shell ratings, expressed in drams of black powder equivalent. As a loose word for a small measure of whisky, it has drifted away from the weight altogether.

1 dram = 0.001771845195 kilograms (approximately).

Sources: Wikipedia: Dram (unit)

Kilogram (kg)

Metric (SI)Current unit

The SI base unit of mass. Since 2019 it is defined by fixing the value of the Planck constant, replacing the old platinum-iridium cylinder in Paris.

Oddly for a base unit, the kilogram began life as a derived one. In 1793 revolutionary France defined the grave as the mass of one litre of water, and a decree of 1795 then replaced it with the kilogramme, a name built from the Greek khilioi (a thousand) and gramma, a Late Latin word for a small weight. In 1799 a platinum cylinder, the Kilogramme des Archives, became the physical standard, matching a cubic decimetre of water at its densest, around 4 degrees Celsius. In 1889 the metric community adopted a platinum-iridium cylinder made in 1879, the International Prototype of the Kilogram, nicknamed Le Grand K.

The kilogram is still the only SI base unit with a prefix in its name. Because SI forbids stacked prefixes, a millionth of a kilogram is a milligram rather than a microkilogram, so every mass prefix is attached to the gram. Calibrating every national standard against one object in a vault near Paris meant that all of them drifted relative to it, so in November 2018 member states voted to tie the kilogram to a fixed value of the Planck constant. The change took effect on 20 May 2019. Day to day nothing shifted, but the definition no longer depends on a single piece of metal.

The kilogram is the reference unit for weight & mass on this site.

Sources: NIST: Kilogram introduction (SI redefinition); Wikipedia: Kilogram

Related conversions

See all weight & mass units.