It was suggested by The United States National Institute of Standards and Technology in 1979 to avoid confusion with the number 1. Also, The International Committee for Weights and Measures stated it is hard to choose an optimal symbol.
You can also read http://physics.nist.gov/Pubs/SP811/sec05.html#table6
It was suggested by The United States National Institute of Standards and Technology in 1979 to avoid confusion with the number 1. Also, The International Committee for Weights and Measures stated it is hard to choose an optimal symbol.
You can also read http://physics.nist.gov/Pubs/SP811/sec05.html#table6
I can't say the reason this convention is used; I use it because that is recommended in the American Chemical Society Style Guide.
both forms are allowed, but mL is more used to avoid confusion with the number one that is confusing in some fonts.
SI unit of litre is abbreviated as 'L'. Hence 'mL' which stands for millilitre is a derived SI unit.
It is somehow interesting that a capital 'L' in "mL" confuses everyone, though you would use a capital 'V' in "mV" (rather than "mv") for voltage, wouldn't you?
And this is not the only example :)
Dear Mr Kochmann,
There's a good reason for that. Volt is derived from Alessandro Voltas surname to honor his work on inventing the battery. Same goes for Amperes etc. Litre is not derived from a surname, and this makes it somehow an exception among units such as metre or minute.
That's true! I did not though of that. Mmmh
But do you think that is the reason? Do people really think about the origin of "Volt", "Ampere", ... when they write down these units? Every time? "Oh, Volt derives from a name, it has to go with a capital V..."?
If that would be the case, I would assume more language dependency here: In German you write every noun (and "Liter" is a noun) with a capital, though - from my experience - Germans also tend to write "ml" instead of "mL".
As I said: Interesting. :)
I remember being told that "from now on we should be writting mL instead of ml"... during a Chemistry lesson in 1992 or 1993! That could have been following an international convention.
I completely agree also with the comment of Professor Parashuram Sahoo and it is absolutely true.
Litre is a non-SI unit accepted for use with the SI (check this: http://www.bipm.org/en/publications/si-brochure/table6.html). Both L and l symbols are listed there, with a footnote mentioning institution that adopts either symbol.
I agree with Dr. Setiyadi's answer. SI unit for volume is m3 (cubic meter). But the volume is generally expressed as L or mL since it is metric system unit of volume. l also can be used but to distinguish from number 1 many people prefer to express the unit as mL.
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