| Deciliters (dL) | Cubic meters (m³) |
|---|---|
| 1 Deciliter | 0.0001 m³ |
| 2 Deciliters | 0.0002 m³ |
| 3 Deciliters | 0.0003 m³ |
| 4 Deciliters | 0.0004 m³ |
| 5 Deciliters | 0.0005 m³ |
| 10 Deciliters | 0.001 m³ |
| 20 Deciliters | 0.002 m³ |
| 25 Deciliters | 0.0025 m³ |
| 50 Deciliters | 0.005 m³ |
| 100 Deciliters | 0.01 m³ |
| Reference | Deciliters (dL) | Cubic meters (m³) |
|---|---|---|
| A teaspoon | 0.05 dL | 0.000005 m³ |
| A can of soft drink | 3.3 dL | 0.00033 m³ |
| A wine bottle | 7.5 dL | 0.00075 m³ |
| A bathtub | 1500 dL | 0.15 m³ |
| An Olympic swimming pool | 25000000 dL | 2500 m³ |
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.
The cubic metre is the SI unit of volume, written m³. It is the volume of a cube one metre on each side, and because the metre is a base unit, every other volume unit in the system is derived from it. It holds a thousand litres, and a cubic metre of fresh water has a mass of very nearly one tonne, which is the single most useful fact about it.
Utilities are billed in it. Domestic water meters almost everywhere record consumption in cubic metres, and a household of four uses somewhere between 100 and 200 of them a year. Natural gas is metered the same way and then converted to energy for billing, because the heat released by a cubic metre of gas depends on its composition and has to be corrected for temperature and pressure at the meter.
Construction orders materials by it. Ready-mixed concrete is sold and delivered by the cubic metre, a standard truck carrying six to eight; excavation and earthworks are priced per cubic metre moved; and sawn timber, aggregate, topsoil and bark are all traded the same way. Because a cubic metre of concrete weighs about 2.4 tonnes, the unit also decides what a lorry or a crane can carry.
Freight uses it in a more subtle way. Shipping and removals quote volume in cubic metres, and air freight charges by whichever is greater, the actual mass or a volumetric mass calculated at a fixed ratio, commonly 167 kilograms to the cubic metre. Light bulky cargo is therefore priced by the space it occupies rather than by what it weighs, and the whole calculation runs on this unit.
Environmental measurement lives here too. River flow is given in cubic metres per second, reservoir capacity in millions of cubic metres, air quality as micrograms of pollutant per cubic metre of air, and ventilation as cubic metres per hour. A room four metres by five with a ceiling at two and a half holds fifty cubic metres of air, which is the sort of figure ventilation standards are written against.
Against imperial and United States units it converts to 35.315 cubic feet or 1.308 cubic yards. The cubic yard matters most in practice, because American concrete and excavation are ordered in it, and the two units are close enough that a mistaken figure looks plausible while being a third out.
One cubic metre equals 1000 litres, about 35.315 cubic feet, about 1.308 cubic yards, or about 264.2 US gallons.