Standard: | Non-SI unit accepted for use with SI |
Quantity: | Volume |
Symbol: | l or L |
A litre (international spelling) or liter (American spelling) is one of the metric units of volume. It is not a basic SI unit, but it is a supplementary unit.
One litre is the volume of 1000 cubic centimetres, that is a cube of 10 × 10 × 10 centimetres (1000 cm3). One litre of water at 4 °C (277 K; 39 °F) has the mass of exactly one kilogram. This results from the definition given in 1795, where the gram was defined as the weight of one cubic centimetre of melting ice.