Pint

The pint is a unit of volume. It is in use mainly in the US, the UK and Ireland, although the value is not the same and the US has two types of pint:

1 Imperial pint (UK) = 20 UK fluid ounces = 0.568261 litres.

1 pint (US, wet) = 16 US fluid ounces = 2 US cups = 0.473176 litres.

1 pint (US, dry) = 0.550610 litres.

The metric equivalents above are rounded to six decimal places.

As part of the metrication process, the pint in the UK is now only used as a measure for beer (see pint glass) and cider when sold by the glass (in public houses for instance) and milk (although milk is also sold in metric quantities). Many recipes published in the UK still provide ingredient quantities in imperial and metric, where the pint is often used as a unit for larger liquid quantites. Most new recipes are now published in metric only with the pint being rounded to 500 ml. Ireland has completed its metrication process and currently the pint is only used in informal speech and for beer.

History

The Imperial pint is defined in terms of the gallon, which was originally defined as the volume of eight pounds of wheat. Other versions of the gallon were defined for different commodities, and there were equally many versions of the pint.

America adopted the British wine gallon (defined in 1707 as 231 cubic inches) as its basic liquid measure, from which the US wet pint is derived, and the British corn gallon (1/8 of a standard "Winchester" bushel of corn, or 268.8 cubic inches) as its dry measure, from which the US dry pint is derived.

In 1824 the British parliament replaced all its variant gallons with a new "imperial" gallon based on ten pounds of distilled water at 62 °F (277.42 cubic inches), from which the UK pint is derived.

The UK pint is officially defined as 0.56826125 litres precisely in The Units of Measurement Regulations 1995.

Translation notes

When translating to and from French, be aware that although the word pinte has the same root, it sometimes designates a different unit of volume. In French Canada in particular, the pint is the chopine whilst the quart is the pinte.