In analogy with the case of surfaces, a metric tensor on an -dimensional paracompact manifold gives rise to a natural way to measure the -dimensional volume of subsets of the manifold. The resulting natural positive Borel measure allows one to develop a theory of integrating functions on the manifold by means of the associated Lebesgue integral.

A measure can be defined, by the Riesz representation theorem, by giving a positive linear functional on the space of compactly supported continuous functions on . More precisely, if is a manifold with a (pseudo-)Riemannian metric tensor , then there is a unique positive Borel measure such that for any coordinate chart ,
for all supported in . Here is the determinant of the matrix formed by the components of the metric tensor in the coordinate chart. That is well-defined on functions supported in coordinate neighborhoods is justified by Jacobian change of variables. It extends to a unique positive linear functional on by means of a partition of unity.

If is in addition oriented, then it is possible to define a natural volume form from the metric tensor. In a positively oriented coordinate system the volume form is represented as
where the are the coordinate differentials and denotes the exterior product in the algebra of differential forms. The volume form also gives a way to integrate functions on the manifold, and this geometric integral agrees with the integral obtained by the canonical Borel measure.

Metric in a vector bundle
The round metric on a sphere
Components of the metric
Canonical measure and volume form