Convert liters to pints

One litre is 2.1134 US liquid pints[1]. You divide the number of litres by 0.473176473 and the answer comes out in pints.

That divisor gives four values you meet on drink labels. Half a litre gives 1.0567 pints. A bottle of 0.75 litres gives 1.5850 pints. Two litres give 4.2268 pints. A five-litre keg gives 10.5669 pints.

With the imperial pint the same litre gives fewer servings. One litre is 1.7598 imperial pints, because that pint holds 0.56826125 litres[2]. The third measure, the US dry pint, gives 1.8162 pints to the litre[1]. That series covers dry goods in the United States, so for a drink you stay with the liquid pint.

You pick the measure with the Pint type switch under the fields, and the divisor changes with it. The figure you type may be a fraction, because the field takes both a decimal point and a slash. The result field gives pints to four decimal places.

The pint is a measure the United Kingdom kept in trade alongside the metric system. The rules allow draught beer and cider to be dispensed by the pint and milk to be sold by the pint in returnable containers[3], and the weights and measures act fixes its capacity at 0.56826125 cubic decimetres[2].

The US pint is smaller, because it comes from a smaller gallon. The US liquid gallon measures 231 cubic inches, so an eighth of it holds 0.4732 litres[1]. Alongside that, the US series of dry measures has a pint of its own holding 0.5506 litres[1].

The litre has a geometric definition. It is the volume of a cube one decimetre on a side[1], so it descends from no gallon and carries one value in every market.

That is why the converter’s switch applies only to the pint. The same litre in millilitres is shown by the liters to ml converter.

One division does the whole job. You divide the number of litres by 0.473176473 and the answer comes out in US pints.

Take a five-litre keg of beer and a British menu that lists servings in pints. Five litres divided by 0.56826125 gives 8.7988 imperial pints. That keg pours eight full pints, and the ninth falls about a fifth short.

Writing the units out shows why the answer lands in pints: 5 l ÷ (0.56826125 l ÷ 1 pt) = 8.7988 pt. The litre cancels against the litre and the pint is what remains.

For the US liquid pint the divisor is 0.473176473, and for the US dry pint it is 0.5506104713575. The Pint type switch substitutes the right figure on its own, and it recalculates even when you change the measure after typing the number.

The pints to liters converter does the sum the other way round, and capacities written in millilitres go through the ml to pints converter.

A one-litre carton is 1.7598 imperial pints. British milk in returnable containers is sold by the pint[3], so a litre falls between one and two of those bottles.

At larger capacities the same sum gives a serving count. A keg of 30 litres gives 52.7926 imperial pints, which is 52 full servings and four fifths of the next one. A fifty-litre keg gives 87.9877 pints, just short of 88.

In English the word already carries two capacities. A British or Irish pint is 0.5683 litres, a US pint 0.4732 litres, and the gap between them is 95.08 millilitres. The US dry pint of 0.5506 litres makes a third, which is why the switch on this page carries three options.

In Quebec the same word describes another volume again. The language authority of the province records pinte as 946 millilitres, the US quart, and puts the pint of the imperial system there at 1,136 millilitres[6]. Half of that pinte is called a chopine and holds 473 millilitres. A litre therefore gives 1.0567 Quebec pintes.

Czech goes further still. The Czech pinta stood at 1.938 litres for liquids from the sixteenth century and was the same measure as one máz[7]. One of those is 3.4104 imperial pints.