Litre

How to spell litre

5 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce litre

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does litre mean?

1. nounA metric unit of volume equal to one thousand cubic centimetres, commonly used for liquids.

Litre in a sentence

• The recipe calls for half a litre of milk.

• She filled the bottle with one litre of water before the hike.

Where does litre come from?

Language of origin: French

The word litre was coined in France in 1795 as one of the base units of the new metric system. The French took it from an older French measure called the litron, a unit used for dry goods like grain, which in turn came through Medieval Latin litra from the Greek litra, a measure of weight and capacity once used in Sicily and southern Italy. So a word that now means a precise volume of liquid traces back to an ancient weight standard. English adopted the French form directly in the early 1800s, which is why British and Canadian writers keep the French -re ending; American English later respelled it as 'liter' to match the way it sounds. That same Greek litra is also the distant ancestor of the Italian lira, the old currency, which shows how a single measuring root branched into both money and volume.

How the word is built

• litre (whole word borrowed from French, with the French -re ending kept in British and Canadian spelling)

British and American spelling

Litre is the British spelling. American English spells it liter.