Convert milliliters to deciliters

dL = mL ÷ 100

Exactly one. This direction is searched by people holding the wrong tool. A Swedish or Swiss recipe asks for 2 dL of cream; the jug in the drawer is marked in millilitres from 50 to 500. The conversion is trivial, but the reflex to double-check it is sensible — moving the point one place instead of two turns 200 mL into 20 dL, a twentyfold error.

Most measuring jugs sold outside Scandinavia carry millilitre graduations at 50 mL intervals, which maps cleanly onto half-decilitre steps. A recipe in whole and half decilitres can be measured without arithmetic once you know that each 100 mL line is one decilitre.

Where it becomes awkward is small quantities. A recipe asking for 0.5 dL of oil means 50 mL, which is about three and a half tablespoons — below the useful range of most jugs. For anything under a decilitre, spoons are more accurate.

Two decilitres of water is 200 g, but two decilitres of flour is roughly 120 g and two of honey around 280 g. Recipes that give dry ingredients by volume assume a particular way of filling the measure, which is why baking by weight is more reliable than baking by volume in any unit.

The reasoning behind the unit — and why Nordic and Swiss kitchens kept it — is on deciliters to milliliters.

Deci means a tenth and milli a thousandth, under the SI prefixes in the SI Brochure published by the International Bureau of Weights and Measures (BIPM), so one tenth of a litre holds one hundred thousandths. The capital L in dL and mL was accepted by the 16th General Conference on Weights and Measures in 1979 to avoid confusing a lowercase l with the number 1.