Conversion from 3 US Liquid pints to Deciliters

Information about the US Liquid pint (pt)

The United States liquid pint is a unit of volume equal to exactly 473.176473 millilitres. Its symbol is pt. It is sixteen United States fluid ounces and an eighth of a United States gallon. It is noticeably smaller than the imperial pint of 568 millilitres, because the American pint holds sixteen fluid ounces where the British one holds twenty.

That difference of four ounces is the whole story of the two pints. Both systems descend from the same medieval English measures, but Britain rebuilt its liquid chain in 1824 around a gallon of ten pounds of water, while the United States kept the older wine gallon of 231 cubic inches. The pint inherited the difference, and a British pint is now about a fifth larger than an American one.

The rhyme survives because the American pint fits it. A pint's a pound the world around works for the United States pint, since sixteen fluid ounces of water weigh 1.04 pounds, and it fails in Britain, where a pint of water weighs a pound and a quarter. The saying is a useful reminder that measurement rhymes travel worse than the measurements themselves.

Draught beer is where the difference becomes visible to travellers, and where American practice is looser than British. There is no federal requirement that a glass sold as a pint contain a pint, and the widely used sixteen-ounce shaker glass holds that volume only when filled to the brim, so a poured beer with a head contains less. Several states have legislated on the point precisely because the imperial system's verified glass has no American equivalent.

Domestic packaging uses it constantly. Milk, cream, ice cream and soft fruit are sold in pint containers, and a donated unit of blood is loosely called a pint although it is about 470 millilitres. Premium ice cream in a pint tub is one of the most recognisable retail formats in the country.

A separate United States dry pint of 551 millilitres exists for produce, and nothing in the word distinguishes it. A pint of cream and a pint of blueberries are therefore different quantities, differing by about sixteen per cent, which is the sort of detail that only becomes visible when someone tries to convert a recipe.

One United States liquid pint equals 473.176 millilitres, 16 US fluid ounces, 0.125 US gallons, or about 0.833 imperial pints.

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.