| Milliliters (mL) | Cubic feet (ft³) |
|---|---|
| 1 Milliliter | 0.000035314666724 ft³ |
| 2 Milliliters | 0.000070629333448 ft³ |
| 3 Milliliters | 0.000105944000172 ft³ |
| 4 Milliliters | 0.000141258666896 ft³ |
| 5 Milliliters | 0.00017657333362 ft³ |
| 10 Milliliters | 0.00035314666724 ft³ |
| 20 Milliliters | 0.00070629333448 ft³ |
| 25 Milliliters | 0.0008828666681 ft³ |
| 50 Milliliters | 0.0017657333362 ft³ |
| 100 Milliliters | 0.0035314666724 ft³ |
| Reference | Milliliters (mL) | Cubic feet (ft³) |
|---|---|---|
| A teaspoon | 5 mL | 0.000176573 ft³ |
| A can of soft drink | 330 mL | 0.0116538 ft³ |
| A wine bottle | 750 mL | 0.026486 ft³ |
| A bathtub | 150000 mL | 5.2972 ft³ |
| An Olympic swimming pool | 2.5 × 109 mL | 88286.7 ft³ |
The millilitre is a unit of volume equal to one thousandth of a litre, written mL or ml. It is exactly one cubic centimetre. It is the working unit of medicine, cookery, cosmetics and the laboratory, and it is the smallest volume most people handle deliberately in the course of a day.
Medicine relies on it more heavily than on any other unit of volume. Oral liquids are dosed in millilitres, syringes are graduated in them, intravenous fluids are prescribed as so many millilitres per hour, and blood test results are reported per millilitre or per decilitre. The precision matters: a tenfold dosing error in a paediatric prescription is a difference of a single decimal place in this unit.
That is why the household spoon has been driven out of medical instructions. A teaspoon is nominally five millilitres, but real spoons vary from two to nine, so dosing devices are now supplied with liquid medicines and marked in millilitres. Regulators in several countries require the millilitre marking precisely because it removes an ambiguity that spoons cannot.
Cooking outside the United States runs on it. European and Asian recipes give liquids in millilitres and litres rather than in cups, which is more precise because a cup measures volume by an unstandardised container while a millilitre does not. Wine and spirit measures, coffee shot sizes, and the capacity of a baby bottle are all specified in millilitres.
A convenient identity helps in the kitchen and the laboratory alike. One millilitre of water has a mass of one gram, so a recipe or a protocol can move between mass and volume for water-like liquids without a real error. Cosmetics use the same unit throughout, from a five-millilitre sample to a five-hundred-millilitre bottle.
Against United States and imperial measures it converts awkwardly, and the two differ from each other. One millilitre is 0.0338 United States fluid ounces but 0.0352 imperial fluid ounces, so a fluid ounce is about four per cent larger in Britain than in America, and any drink or medicine volume converted between them needs to state which system was meant.
One millilitre equals 1 cubic centimetre, 0.001 litres, about 0.0338 US fluid ounces, or about 0.0352 imperial fluid ounces.
The cubic foot is a unit of volume equal to 1728 cubic inches, or 28.3168 litres. Its symbol is cu ft, sometimes written ft³. It is the volume of a cube one foot on each side, and it is the unit in which the United States measures natural gas, appliance capacity and air flow, three fields with almost nothing else in common.
Natural gas is its largest use by far. American gas meters record consumption in hundreds of cubic feet, bills are issued in thousands, and national reserves are quoted in trillions. Because the energy in a given volume of gas depends on its composition, utilities also publish a heating value per cubic foot, and the bill is the product of the two.
Appliances are sized in it. Refrigerator and freezer capacity in the United States is quoted in cubic feet, so a family refrigerator is about twenty and a chest freezer perhaps seven, and the same convention covers microwave ovens, washing machines and truck cargo boxes. Shoppers compare products by a number that describes usable space rather than external dimensions, which is genuinely more useful.
Air movement uses it per unit time. Fans, extractors, air conditioners and compressors are rated in cubic feet per minute, a figure abbreviated to CFM in every American catalogue. Ventilation standards are written as required air changes, which convert to cubic feet per minute once the room volume is known, so the unit sits on both sides of the calculation.
Materials and freight follow the same scale. Concrete, gravel, mulch and topsoil are sold by the cubic foot in smaller quantities and by the cubic yard in larger ones, twenty-seven cubic feet making one cubic yard. A cubic foot of fresh water weighs 62.4 pounds and holds about 7.48 United States gallons, which are the two figures most often needed alongside it.
Its metric equivalent is not memorable, at 28.3168 litres or 0.0283 cubic metres, and neither is its relationship to the cubic inch, at 1728. Those factors are why engineering outside the United States moved to metric volumes early even where lengths stayed imperial for longer.
One cubic foot equals 1728 cubic inches, about 28.317 litres, about 7.48 US gallons, or about 0.0283 cubic metres.