percent

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See also: per cent and per cent.

English[edit]

English Wikipedia has an article on:
Wikipedia

Alternative forms[edit]

Etymology[edit]

From New Latin per centum (“by the hundred”).

Pronunciation[edit]

  • (UK) IPA(key): /pəˈsɛnt/
  • (US) IPA(key): /pɚˈsɛnt/
  • Audio (US)(file)
  • Rhymes: -ɛnt

Adverb[edit]

percent (not comparable)

  1. For every hundred (used with preceding numeral to form a noun phrase expressing a proportion). [from 16th c.]
    • 2002 May 8, Leon Jaroff, Time:
      Diane Watson has had a distinguished career in education and politics, and last year was elected to the House of Representatives, winning 75 percent of the vote in her Congressional district.
    • 2011, Frank Dikötter, Mao's Great Famine‎[1], Bloomsbury, →ISBN, →OCLC, →OL, pages 297–298:
      In Sichuan the rates were much higher. In Kaixian county, a close examination by a team sent by the provincial party committee at the time concluded that in Fengle commune, where 17 per cent of the population had perished in less than a year, up to 65 per cent of the victims had died because they were beaten, punished with food deprivation or forced into committing suicide.
    • 2016 July 7, Arthur Neslen, The Guardian:
      Twelve percent of the world’s population now relies directly or indirectly on the fisheries industry.

Usage notes[edit]

  • A percentage is often denoted by the character %.
    50% denotes 50 percent.
  • The difference of two percentages is measured by percentage point, not by percent.
  • In the UK, per cent is the normal form.

Derived terms[edit]

Noun[edit]

percent (plural percent or percents)

  1. A percentage, a proportion (especially per hundred).
    only a small percent attain the top ranks
  2. One part per hundred; one percent, hundredth. [from 19th c.]
    • 2008, Niall Ferguson, The Ascent of Money, Penguin, page 254:
      And from 1966, under Regulation Q, there was a ceiling of 5.5 per cent on their deposit rates, a quarter of a per cent more than banks were allowed to pay.
  3. The percent sign, %.
  4. An annuity or security with a certain fixed and guaranteed annual percentage rate of return or percentage dividend.
    • 1848, Edward W. Cox, Esq., of the Middle Temple, Barrister at Law, editor, Reports of Cases in Criminal Law Argued and Determined in All the Courts of England and Ireland: Volume II 1868 to 1848‎[2], page 371:
      […]Several stocks in the Three Per Cents and Three Per Cents Reduced to be transferred into the name and to the credit of the prosecutor, without any authority to him (the traverser) to sell, negotiate, transfer or pledge the said 9000l. Three-and-a-Quarter per Cent. Annuities.
    • 1886, Jerome K. Jerome, “On Being Hard Up”, in Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow‎[3]:
      Why, from the pleasant and businesslike manner in which the transaction is carried out, it might be a large purchase in the three per cents. Yet what a piece of work a man makes of his first "pop."
    • 2018, Nancy Henry, Women, Literature and Finance in Victorian Britain: Cultures of Investment‎[4], page 33:
      picking up on a phrase that was used as early as 1752, Benjamin Disraeli famously referred to the “sweet simplicity of the three percents in his novel Endymion (1880) because of the reliable dividend this form of investment provided.

Derived terms[edit]

Translations[edit]

Prepositional phrase[edit]

percent

  1. Per hundred.
    • 2014, Alan Tussy, Diane Koenig, Basic Mathematics for College Students with Early Integers, →ISBN, page 637:
      By how many percent did the cancer survival rate for breast cancer increase by 2008?

Usage notes[edit]

  • Percent/per cent originated as a shortening of the Latin phrase per centum, “per hundred”, and historically the use of the word as a noun (as in “half a percent” or “percents”) was regarded as an error,[1] though such use has now become so common that it is recognized by all other major dictionaries,[2][3][4][5][6][7][8] and a few treat the word as being only a noun.[8] Of those which recognize non-nounal uses, most label it an adverb[2][3][4][5][6] and many also label it an adjective[2][3][4][7] though it does not meet tests of adjectivity.

See also[edit]

Typography

References[edit]

  1. ^ Various older pedagogic works, e.g. Charles Harvey Raymond's Essentials of English composition (1923), page 461, prescribe: "Per cent is an adverb meaning in the hundred. [...] Percentage is a noun meaning rate per cent."
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 “percent”, in Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary, Springfield, Mass.: Merriam-Webster, 1996–present.
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 “percent”, in The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 5th edition, Boston, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016, →ISBN.
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 “percent”, in Collins English Dictionary.
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 “percent”, in Cambridge English Dictionary, Cambridge, Cambridgeshire: Cambridge University Press, 1999–present.
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 “percent”, in Lexico, Dictionary.com; Oxford University Press, 2019–2022.
  7. ↑ 7.0 7.1 “percent”, in Dictionary.com Unabridged, Dictionary.com, LLC, 1995–present.
  8. ↑ 8.0 8.1 “percent” (US) / “percent” (UK) in Macmillan English Dictionary.

Further reading[edit]

Anagrams[edit]

Chinese[edit]

Etymology[edit]

From English percent. Doublet of 巴仙 (bāxiān).

Pronunciation[edit]

Noun[edit]

percent

  1. (Hong Kong Cantonese) percent (Classifier: 個／个 c)

References[edit]

French[edit]

Pronunciation[edit]

Verb[edit]

percent

  1. third-person plural present indicative/subjunctive of percer

Hungarian[edit]

Etymology[edit]

percen +‎ -t

Pronunciation[edit]

  • IPA(key): [ˈpɛrt͡sɛnt]
  • Hyphenation: per‧cent

Verb[edit]

percent

  1. third-person singular indicative past indefinite of percen
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