Kitchen Measurement Abbreviations Explained

Why abbreviations cause mistakes

Recipes are written in shorthand to save space, and that shorthand is not fully standardized. The same letters can mean different things depending on the country, the era of the cookbook, or whether a letter is upper or lower case. A single misread letter can mean three times too much salt or a wildly different amount of liquid.

The safest approach is to learn the common abbreviations once and to watch for the few that are genuinely ambiguous. The sections below group them by what they measure.

Spoons and cups

The teaspoon is written tsp or, less often, a lowercase t. The tablespoon is Tbsp, tbsp or a capital T. The only difference between the two single-letter forms is capitalization, so a capital T is a tablespoon and a lowercase t is a teaspoon. One tablespoon equals three teaspoons. Swapping them is costly: reading a lowercase t as a capital T triples the amount, which is a serious error for salt, baking powder or chili.

Spoon sizes differ by region. The US teaspoon is about 4.93 mL and the US tablespoon about 14.79 mL, while the metric teaspoon is exactly 5 mL and the metric tablespoon is 15 mL. In Australia a tablespoon is 20 mL. A cup is written c or C, and it may be 236.6 mL (US) or 250 mL (metric). When a capital C follows a number and a degree sign, as in 180 °C, it means Celsius, not cups.

Volume units

Milliliter is written mL or ml, and liter is L or l. Capital L became an accepted alternative in 1979 because a lowercase l looks too much like the digit 1. A deciliter, dl or dL, is 100 mL, so 10 dl make a liter, and it appears in some European recipes. The abbreviation cc means cubic centimeter, which is the same as a milliliter.

For larger US volumes, fl oz is a fluid ounce (about 29.57 mL), pt is a pint of 16 fl oz (473 mL), qt is a quart of two pints (946 mL) and gal is a gallon of four quarts (3.785 L). British recipes may use imperial units instead: an imperial pint is 20 imperial fluid ounces, or about 568 mL, so it is larger than the US pint.

Weight units

Ounce is oz, and pound is lb, from the Latin libra. You will also see lbs for the plural. One pound is 16 ounces, and an ounce is 28.35 g. A kilogram is about 2.2 pounds. The metric abbreviations are g for gram, kg for kilogram (1,000 g) and mg for milligram (one thousandth of a gram).

Pay attention to the difference between oz and fl oz. The first measures weight and the second measures volume. If a recipe says “8 oz cream cheese”, it means weight, about 227 g. If it says “8 fl oz milk”, it means a cup of liquid, about 237 mL.

Descriptive words

Some terms are not abbreviations but behave like them: level, heaping, scant, pinch, dash and stick. A level spoon is filled and then scraped flat. A heaping spoon is mounded, and a scant spoon is filled slightly short. A pinch and a dash are small, informal amounts with no official size.

A stick refers to American butter, which is sold in sticks of 4 oz, equal to ½ cup or 8 tablespoons, about 113 g. Outside the US, butter is normally sold by weight, so a recipe that mentions sticks is best converted using grams.

Temperature shorthand

Oven temperatures use °C for Celsius and °F for Fahrenheit. UK recipes may instead give a gas mark, abbreviated GM, where gas mark 4 corresponds to 180 °C or 350 °F, and gas mark 6 to 200 °C or 400 °F. Some recipes add a separate figure marked fan, meaning a fan-assisted oven. That number is for fan ovens only, so use the one that matches the oven you actually have.

If neither the unit nor the symbol is given, check the numbers. A figure such as 350 is almost certainly Fahrenheit, while 180 is almost certainly Celsius.

A habit that helps

When a recipe from another country looks unfamiliar, spend half a minute checking the units before you start. Write the unit next to each ingredient, note whether the recipe uses a US or metric cup, and convert anything that is ambiguous into milliliters or grams.

A cooking converter such as this one can do the arithmetic for the spoons, cups and fluid ounces once you know what the shorthand means. The reading, though, is still yours to do: no tool can tell you whether a capital T in a handwritten recipe was meant to be a tablespoon. Recipes written only in grams and milliliters are the least ambiguous, since those units mean the same thing everywhere.