measurements

[jennyjukes]

i'm quite confused with measurements, what do people generally mean when they say 'half a cup'. i read a post about using half a cup of baking soda with 2 cups of water or half a cup of EVOO. what really got me was when reading about diluting shampoo someone said 'i took some water - maybe half a cup and added a squirt of shampoo'. does this literally made half a mug? or..?

lol thank you :)

[Madora]

i'm quite confused with measurements, what do people generally mean when they say 'half a cup'. i read a post about using half a cup of baking soda with 2 cups of water or half a cup of EVOO. what really got me was when reading about diluting shampoo someone said 'i took some water - maybe half a cup and added a squirt of shampoo'. does this literally made half a mug? or..?

lol thank you :)

I don't know about the others, but half a cup measures out to 4 ounces in my glass Pyrex measuring cup.

[fridgee]

i'm quite confused with measurements, what do people generally mean when they say 'half a cup'. i read a post about using half a cup of baking soda with 2 cups of water or half a cup of EVOO. what really got me was when reading about diluting shampoo someone said 'i took some water - maybe half a cup and added a squirt of shampoo'. does this literally made half a mug? or..?

lol thank you :)

I don't know where you live but a cup is a kind of volumetric measurement used in the united states where they still use imperial measurements. A cup is about the size of a tea cup, so smaller than a mug. It is about 236ml. Hope that helps!

[heidi w.]

In the US we are still not in the international measurement standards. We still use cups, gallons, inches and so on. EA: We do not use the metric system at all, except we sometimes use metric standards in auto repair. END ETA

If someone says half a cup, in liquid, in the US they mean 4 oz. IF someone says a cup, it translates, in liquid to 8 oz. In dry goods, a half a cup means 1/2 measuring cup measurement as indicated on the measuring cup. In dry goods a full cup is 1 cup.

A lot of people don't actually measure stuff, so they use references such as half a cup to hint at the measurement, in an approximately measure. IF you were to squirt a half a cup, you'd be there for a while, squirting stuff out of the bottle. I'd take a squirt to mean something around a teaspoon measurement. At most, a tablespoon.

These are kind of references to cooking measurements. In different countries, measurements are done differently. Such as really professional bakers in the US weigh the ingredients. They don't work with cups or teaspoon or tablespoons at all. My mother is professional baker and that's how she does it now.

heidi w.

[freckles]

I ended up buying a set of measuring cups from amazon because American recipes I found on the internet were all about measuring things by volume, rather than by weight which is what I'm used to!

The wiki page about the unit known as a cup is here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cup_(unit)

But the short answer is that it's about 250ml (240ml or 250ml depending on who's saying it -- 250ml is close enough I figure!) -- a small glass (like for juice), rather than a mug, really.

[heidi w.]

i'm quite confused with measurements, what do people generally mean when they say 'half a cup'. i read a post about using half a cup of baking soda with 2 cups of water or half a cup of EVOO. what really got me was when reading about diluting shampoo someone said 'i took some water - maybe half a cup and added a squirt of shampoo'. does this literally made half a mug? or..?

lol thank you :)

I would say that 1/2 cup of baking soda to 2 cups of water is an awful lot of baking soda.

EVOO: more and more are using Extra Virgin Olive Oil and apparently having great results, but I'm a bit scared of using EVOO as an oil. I imagine it would be a bit difficult to get out of the hair.

heidi w.

[Kizuna]

I'm living with a american (sister in law) and she's bought a measuring cup which has both cups and ml. This one shows 1 cup = 2,5dl and 2 cups = 5dl. :) I hope that helped!

[torrilin]

I actually tend to say "cup" and mean "y'know, the glass you keep in the bathroom for rinsing hair". I usually have a large one that lives in the bathroom of about 500-1000mL (as in the cup itself varies, not it's a magical expanding and shrinking cup), and if I need or want to do a minimal water use wash, I can get my hair thoroughly wet with 500mL, and then thoroughly rinsed with 500mL. Someone with thicker hair might need more, but it'd take quite a lot more hair to need more than 1L.

Splash means somewhere in the 5-15mL range. Just enough to cover the bottom of your hair rinsing cup.

I tend to use squirt for stuff that isn't very liquidy. There, I usually compare to peas and money. A US dime is a bit bigger than 1cm (iirc a UK 5 pence coin is about the same), and a US quarter is about 2.5cm. A pea is well... a pea. Dunno the euro coin equivalents.

But despite being an American, I tend to strongly prefer metric, to the point where for a lot of things I get an imperial measure and I'll demand to be told what that is in real measurements. Most stuff sold in the US is labelled in both metric and imperial, and for a lot of internationally available products, the metric measure is more sensible.

[fridgee]

I tend to use squirt for stuff that isn't very liquidy. There, I usually compare to peas and money. A US dime is a bit bigger than 1cm (iirc a UK 5 pence coin is about the same), and a US quarter is about 2.5cm. A pea is well... a pea. Dunno the euro coin equivalents.

That is so useful to know, thankyou! I always got lost when people talk in US money sizes, particularly because your coins are referred to by name rather than value. I have left over dollars at home but they say their value in cents, not 'hi I'm a dime!' So could never work out how much people meant!

[torrilin]

Ah. The coin names are pretty easy.

Penny is well... penny. If you're speaking British English you'd say pence, and in German it's pfennig. Otherwise known as a 1 cent coin. The US was one of the first countries to use a decimal money system, so our ancestors couldn't decide quite if pence or cent was the right base word... If you speak Canadian English it's still a penny.

Next up is nickel aka a 5 cent piece. It is in fact made of nickel, hence the name.

Dimes are 10 cents. Not sure of the derivation.

Quarter is 25 cents, aka 1/4 of a dollar.

Half dollar is not much used, but is what it say on the tin... 50 cents. Canada uses half dollars more, tho theirs are a notably different size from ours. On many coins, you have to look closely to tell if it is Canadian or US, and in many areas you might randomly get a Canadian coin in your change.

Canada adds loonie, their one dollar coin, and toonie, the 2 dollar coin. The US has an incompetent mint, and does not use dollar coins much.

[Pierre]

Dime is from French dîme, which is from Latin decimus, which means tenth.

[Anje]

Next up is nickel aka a 5 cent piece. It is in fact made of nickel, hence the name.
Strangely, they're not made with much nickel. They'd stick to magnets if they were. They're 25% nickel, 75% copper.

[torrilin]

Yeah, but originally :).

It'd be sort of amusing if the US got rid of all the money that costs too much to make, since I think that'd leave us with dimes, quarters, and 1 and 5 dollar coins.

[Anje]

It'd be hard to make change!

[woolyleprechaun]

Personaly, I have a teacup i use for measuring. Its not the most accurate thing in the world, but it works fine for proportions (I.E, a recipe that calles for 2 cups of flour, 1 cup of sugar, half a cup of butter....I get it about right :))