Convert Carats to Pounds

About converting Carats to Pounds

Carats (ct) and Pounds (lb) are both units of weight & mass, so converting between them is a single multiplication: multiply your Carats figure by 0.0004409. Ten Carats comes to 0.004409 Pounds, and a hundred works out at 0.04409 Pounds.

Rule of thumb: going from Carats to Pounds divides, so the figure always shrinks — it takes about 2,267.96 Carats to make a single Pound. If your answer came out bigger, you have the conversion the wrong way round.

What is a Carat?

The metric carat is 0.2 grams exactly, standardised early in the twentieth century to replace a tangle of local carats that differed from one gem market to the next. Its name is traditionally traced to the carob seed, once used as a counterweight for small valuables. The trap is the near-identical karat, which is not a mass at all — it measures gold purity in twenty-fourths, so 18-karat gold is eighteen parts gold to six of other metal. Jewellers also split the carat into 100 points, which is why a "fifty-point" diamond is simply half a carat.

What is a Pound?

The pound descends from the Roman libra pondo, "a pound by weight", which is why English took pound from the second word and the abbreviation lb from the first. The version used here is the avoirdupois pound, from an Old French phrase meaning "goods of weight" — the merchants’ system for ordinary bulk trade. A separate troy pound survived for precious metals and was never the same size. The 1959 international yard and pound agreement finally fixed the avoirdupois pound at exactly 0.45359237 kilograms across the English-speaking world, ending a long tail of national variants.

To put both in perspective: a typical engagement-ring diamond weighs about one carat, while a pound is roughly a loaf of bread.

The converter above updates as you type, and the table lists common values for quick reference. Need the opposite direction? Use the Pounds to Carats converter, or browse all Weight & Mass converters.