Convert Hogshead (hogshead) to Exaliter (EL) instantly.
About these units
Hogshead (hogshead)
A hogshead is a traditional barrel volume whose size varied by commodity, region, and era. In British and colonial American contexts, a hogshead for beer or ale was commonly 54 imperial gallons, while for wine it was 63 gallons. Hogsheads were central to colonial commerce, especially in the tobacco trade, where standardized hogsheads—large wooden barrels—became essential for shipping cured leaves across the Atlantic. These giant casks often doubled as storage containers, shipping crates, and even temporary furniture. While the hogshead is not used in modern measurement, it occupies a prominent place in historical literature, trade records, and maritime archaeology. Its enduring cultural footprint reflects the importance of cooperage (barrel-making) in pre-industrial economies.
Exaliter (EL)
An exaliter, equal to 10¹⁸ liters, appears in discussions of planetary-scale volumes, such as estimating water content across extraterrestrial oceans, atmospheric volumes of gas giants, or hydrospheric mass estimates in exoplanet research. Because this unit is so large, it is rarely used in practical Earth-based science except in global summations. However, in cosmology or exoplanet studies, Vast quantities of liquids or gases on super-Earths or ocean worlds may be expressed in EL to maintain manageable numeric magnitudes. The exaliter represents the outer limits of volumetric units still grounded in physical application rather than purely abstract scaling.