Conversion from 2 Cubic centimeters to Deciliters

Information about the Cubic centimeter (cm³)

The cubic centimetre is a unit of volume equal to one millionth of a cubic metre, written cm³ and often abbreviated cc. It is the volume of a cube one centimetre on each side, and since the litre was redefined in 1964 it is exactly one millilitre. The two names describe the same quantity, but they belong to different trades and are not interchangeable in every context.

Engines are its most visible home. Motorcycle and small-engine displacement is quoted in cubic centimetres, so a 125, a 600 and a litre bike are named by the swept volume of their cylinders. Licence categories in much of the world are drawn on the same scale, with a 125 cc limit for learners in many European countries, which turns the unit into a legal boundary rather than a mere description.

Car engines cross over to litres at about a thousand cubic centimetres, purely for readability, so a 1998 cc engine is advertised as a two-litre. American practice used cubic inches for the same purpose well into the 1980s, and the conversion is worth knowing: 1000 cubic centimetres is 61 cubic inches, so a 350 cubic inch engine is 5.7 litres.

Medicine has deliberately retreated from the abbreviation. Syringes were once marked in cc and clinicians spoke that way, but handwritten cc can be misread as a unit symbol or as a pair of zeros, and medication safety bodies now place it on lists of abbreviations that should not be used. The instruction is to write mL instead, even though the quantity is identical.

Materials science keeps the unit for density. Grams per cubic centimetre is the standard way to state how heavy a substance is for its size: water is 1.00, aluminium 2.70, steel about 7.85, lead 11.34 and gold 19.3. Those numbers are memorable precisely because the cubic centimetre is small enough that everyday solids land between one and twenty.

Modelling and manufacturing use it for part volume. Computer-aided design reports the volume of a component in cubic centimetres, which converts directly to mass once a density is chosen and to material cost in additive manufacturing. It is the natural unit for anything that fits in a hand.

One cubic centimetre equals 1 millilitre, 1000 cubic millimetres, 0.000001 cubic metres, or about 0.061 cubic inches.

Information about the Deciliter (dL)

The decilitre is a unit of volume equal to one tenth of a litre, or one hundred millilitres. Its symbol is dL, and the lower-case dl is common. Although the deci prefix has fallen out of use almost everywhere else, the decilitre is alive in two quite separate places: the Nordic kitchen and the clinical laboratory.

Scandinavian cooking is built on it. Swedish, Norwegian, Danish and Finnish recipes give flour, sugar, milk, cream and stock in decilitres, and a set of nested measuring cups marked in decilitres and fractions of one is standard kitchen equipment. Where an English recipe says a cup and an Italian one weighs the flour, a Nordic recipe asks for three decilitres, which is both faster and more repeatable than either.

Switzerland uses it for drink. Wine in a Swiss restaurant is ordered by the decilitre, so a glass is one or two and a carafe five, and the measure is printed on the glass. Because a decilitre is close to the volume of a modest wine pour, the unit gives customers an exact quantity rather than a description, which is what licensing law in several cantons requires.

Clinical chemistry is its other stronghold, and there it decides how a whole country reads its blood tests. Glucose, cholesterol and creatinine are reported in milligrams per decilitre in the United States, Japan, France, Italy and Spain, and in millimoles per litre in Britain, Canada, Australia and the Nordic countries. A fasting glucose of 100 milligrams per decilitre is 5.6 millimoles per litre, and the same person's result therefore looks entirely different depending on the laboratory.

Haemoglobin crosses the divide. It is reported in grams per decilitre almost everywhere, so a normal adult value of 13 to 17 grams per decilitre reads the same in most of the world. The decilitre survives in these places because a hundred millilitres of blood is a convenient reference quantity and because changing an established reporting unit risks misreading a result.

For scale, a decilitre is a small glass of water, half a mug of coffee, or the volume of a large egg and a half. It converts to 3.38 United States fluid ounces or 3.52 imperial fluid ounces, and to a little under half a United States cup, which is why converted Nordic recipes rarely come out in round numbers.

One decilitre equals 100 millilitres, 0.1 litres, about 3.38 US fluid ounces, or about 3.52 imperial fluid ounces.