Convert Ounces to Pounds

About converting Ounces to Pounds

Ounces (oz) and Pounds (lb) are both units of weight & mass, so converting between them is a single multiplication: multiply your Ounces figure by 0.0625. Ten Ounces comes to 0.625 Pounds, and a hundred works out at 6.25 Pounds.

Rule of thumb: going from Ounces to Pounds divides, so the figure always shrinks — it takes about 16 Ounces to make a single Pound. If your answer came out bigger, you have the conversion the wrong way round.

What is an Ounce?

The ounce here is the avoirdupois ounce, one sixteenth of a pound, and the qualifier matters. The troy ounce used to price gold and silver is noticeably heavier, so a "one ounce" gold coin is not an ounce of anything else — a confusion that has cost people real money. Muddier still is the fluid ounce, which measures volume rather than mass and differs between the US and the UK. The name comes from the Latin uncia, a twelfth part: it was a twelfth of the Roman libra, and the move to sixteen ounces to the pound came later.

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 slice of sandwich bread weighs about an ounce, 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 Ounces converter, or browse all Weight & Mass converters.