How Many Cups In A Pint? (+ Conversion Charts!)

Everything you need to know about converting cups in a pint (and other helpful imperial measurements)!

Diagram of cups, pints, and quarts in a gallon

Cups to Pints

There are 2 cups in 1 pint.
One cup is a ½ of 1 pint.
A cup is 8 fluid ounces and a pint is 16 fluid ounces.

These are all handy measurements that can be hard to remember, but oh so important in cooking. The metric system would definitely be easier, but we Americans like our fluid ounces, cups, and pints, and probably will for quite a while longer.

Having lived in the Netherlands for five years, I became accustomed to friends asking me why America still uses these 200-year-old measurements when the rest of the world (well except the USA, Myanmar, and Liberia) have moved on to the simple to remember decimal based metric system?

Well, it is a long story, or at least an old one going back to Ancient Rome. In Rome everything was measured in 1/2s, 1/4s, 1/8s, 1/16th etc. This seems awkward today as the decimal based metric system makes so much sense, but in Roman times a 1/8 of gallon wine jug was easy to measure. A gallon jug was divided in half, half again, and half a 3^rd time to get a pint. This was an easy way to accurately measure anything. Dividing a wine jug into 1/10s was hard to do accurately. This logic is evident in all our non-metric measurements.

Glass pyrex with various measurements around it

What Is A Pint?

A pint is 16 fluid ounces or two cups. The term pint comes from the French word pinte and likely from a Latin term pincta derived from painted marks on the side of a container to show its capacity. In Rome a pint was 1/8 of a gallon as eights were a normal unit of measurement as we said.

What Is A Cup?

1 cup is 8 ounces. There are 2 cups in a Pint, but how did cups become a unit of measure? The standardized measure of a cup is relatively new. It was standardized by Fannie Farmer the director of the Boston Cooking School in 1896, and first appeared in her book “The Boston Cooking School Cook Book”. Prior to Fannie’s intervention, it was common for recipes to use terms like a handful of beans or a generous portion of sugar. Now we all know people who can cook that way. They just pour in ingredients, and their cooking is always perfect. For the rest of us mere mortals Fannie Farmer’s standardization was a great service.