Frequently asked questions

A cup measures volume — how much space something fills — while grams measure mass. The bridge between them is density, and every ingredient has its own. Granulated sugar is made of dense little crystals that pack tightly, so a cup holds about 200 grams. Flour is full of air between fine particles, so the same cup holds only about 120 grams. That's why an ingredient-aware converter matters: one generic cups-to-grams number would be wrong for nearly everything in your pantry.

No. A US legal cup is 240 mL (the older customary cup is 236.6 mL), an Australian metric cup is 250 mL, and traditional UK recipes generally avoid cups altogether, using pounds, ounces and pints instead. The differences are small per cup — about 4% between US and Australian — but they compound in big batches. MeasureMate uses the US 240 mL cup throughout, because most online recipes are written that way. If your recipe is Australian, add roughly 4% to volume amounts or, better, weigh the ingredients.

An ounce (oz) measures weight — about 28.35 grams. A fluid ounce (fl oz) measures volume — about 29.6 mL in the US. They only match for water-like liquids, where a fluid ounce of water happens to weigh almost exactly one ounce. For anything denser or lighter the two part ways: a fluid ounce of honey weighs roughly 1.5 ounces, and a fluid ounce of oil a little under one. If a recipe lists ounces of a liquid it usually means fluid ounces, but it pays to check.

The exact formula is °F = °C × 9/5 + 32. For mental maths, double the Celsius figure, subtract 10% of that, then add 32. Take 20 °C: doubled is 40, minus 4 is 36, plus 32 is 68 °F — exact. For a rougher version just double and add 30, which stays within a few degrees for everyday weather. Going the other way, subtract 32 and halve it. And remember the handy anchors: 0 °C is 32 °F, body temperature 37 °C is 98.6 °F, and −40° is the same in both scales.

Three different units share the name. The metric tonne is exactly 1,000 kg and is the standard in Australia, the UK and most of the world. The US short ton is 2,000 pounds, about 907 kg. The UK long ton — now mostly historical, surviving in shipping — is 2,240 pounds, about 1,016 kg. The spread between the short ton and the long ton is roughly 12%, big enough to matter in freight or materials. When a source just says "ton", check which country it comes from before converting.

Both definitions exist, which is why the question keeps coming up. The SI (decimal) definition says 1 kB = 1,000 bytes, 1 MB = 1,000,000 bytes and so on — that's what drive manufacturers, networking standards and this tool use. The binary units based on 1,024 have their own names: kibibyte (KiB), mebibyte (MiB), gibibyte (GiB). The mismatch explains the classic mystery of the "1 TB" drive that shows up as about 931 "GB" — the software is really counting gibibytes. MeasureMate follows the decimal SI standard.

The two countries standardised their gallons differently in the 1800s, and pints inherited the split. A UK (imperial) pint is 568 mL — 20 imperial fluid ounces — while a US pint is 473 mL, or 16 US fluid ounces. That makes the British pint about 20% larger, which is why a pint of beer in London is noticeably more than one in New York. The same gap runs through quarts and gallons, so always confirm which system an older or imported recipe uses.

Spoon and level — and it genuinely matters. Dragging the cup through the bag compresses the flour, packing in 15–25% more than the standard weight; that's the difference between a tender cake and a dense one. The reliable method: fluff the flour, spoon it loosely into the cup until it overflows, then sweep the top level with a straight edge. Published cups-to-grams charts, including the densities behind our cooking converter, all assume this spoon-and-level technique, so a scooped cup will quietly throw your conversions off.

Food Calories (written with a capital C) are actually kilocalories — each one is 1,000 of the small scientific calories used in chemistry. So a 250-Calorie snack contains 250,000 small calories, or about 1,046 kilojoules. In practice every food label, diet plan and fitness app means kilocalories, even when it prints "calories" in lower case. Australia mostly labels energy in kilojoules instead; to convert, one food Calorie equals 4.184 kJ, so divide kilojoules by roughly 4.2 to get Calories.

A nautical mile is 1,852 metres — based on one minute of latitude on the Earth's surface, which makes it natural for navigation on charts. A knot is a speed of one nautical mile per hour, about 1.85 km/h or 1.15 mph. Ships, aircraft and meteorologists all use them: airliner speeds, wind strengths in cyclone warnings and yacht-race results are all quoted in knots. The name comes from sailors counting knots in a rope paid out behind the ship to gauge its speed.

For typical home cooking, comfortably accurate — usually within a few percent. The gram figures come from published spoon-and-level density charts for each ingredient, measured per US 240 mL cup. Real-world results drift slightly with brand, humidity, grind and how the cup is filled, which is why no volume-based conversion can ever be perfect. For everyday cooking that margin is irrelevant; for precision baking — bread, macarons, pastry — a digital scale and a recipe written in grams is still the gold standard.

Because they belong to a different measurement family, and families never cross. Centimetres can't become litres, and millilitres can't become degrees — they measure different physical things, so no conversion factor exists. When you pick a "from" unit, the converter greys out every unit it genuinely can't reach, so an impossible conversion is never one mis-tap away. The one practical bridge between families is density, which links volume to weight — and that's exactly what the cooking tab uses to turn cups into grams.

Yes — every converter on the site is free, with no sign-up, no app to install and no usage limits. The site is supported by a small number of clearly labelled adverts. It also works well on phones and tablets, so you can keep it open on the bench while you cook. If something looks wrong or a unit you need is missing, tell us through the contact page and we'll look into it.

Conversion is rarely the whole story, but rounding can play a part. If every ingredient gets rounded — 120 g of flour becoming "about half a cup", say — the small errors stack, shifting ratios that baking depends on. Other usual suspects: a different cup standard (US versus Australian), scooped rather than spooned flour, ingredient differences between countries (flour protein levels, butter fat, sugar crystal size), and oven temperature in the wrong scale — 180 °C is 356 °F, not 180 °F. Convert once from the original amounts, round at the end, and weigh where you can.