What does the “cc” value of an engine indicate?

Capacity of an auto-mobile engine is usually expressed in cubic centimetres or cc.
So, what do you exactly mean when you say that a particular car has is powered by a 1000 cc engine?

A complete operation of an internal combustion engine which starts with injecting the fuel into the cylinder, burns the fuel to generate energy and releases exhaust. One complete such cycle is called a combustion cycle and each operation within a combustion cycle is called a stroke.
Now, the capacity of an engine is nothing but the amount of fuel mixture (fuel + air) that an engine can accommodates in one combustion cycle. As it is volume that we are measuring here, the units are in cubic centimetres or cc. It can also be expressed in liters.

As burning of more fuel generates more energy, an engine which can accommodate a higher amount of fuel in a combustion cycle, is believed to generate more power than an engine with lesser cc capacity an also less economical in terms of fuel consumption.

These conventional beliefs are now being challenged. Traditionally an engine with more cc capacity would tend to produce more power but new developments in technology and innovations have changed this linear relationship between cc capacity and power output.

Also, more fuel per cycle logically means a higher fuel consumption which in turn means a worse mileage figure for the engine. This linear relationship is also being challenged now with engines with a higher cubic capacity actually ending up more economical than the smaller engines.

So, currently we have companies producing engines with higher power output than older versions with a higher cubic capacity while being more efficient than the earlier versions with lesser cubic capacity.

Cheers to innovation!