Cent

How to spell cent

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce cent

What does cent mean?

1. nounA unit of money equal to one hundredth of a dollar or euro, or the small coin of that value.

Cent in a sentence

• The parking meter rejected my last cent.

• She counted the change down to the final cent.

Where does cent come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word comes from the Latin centum, which simply meant 'hundred', and it entered English through French during the late 1300s. The link to a hundred explains its modern monetary role: a cent is one hundredth part of a larger unit such as the dollar or the euro, so the coin literally takes its name from the idea of dividing money into a hundred pieces. The same centum root sits inside many familiar words, including 'century' (a span of a hundred years), 'percent' (literally 'by the hundred'), and 'centipede' (the creature once imagined to have a hundred feet). The currency sense was fixed in the 1780s when the new United States chose the cent as its smallest coin. The spelling trap is purely aural: 'cent' sounds identical to 'scent' (a smell) and 'sent' (the past tense of send), yet only the money word keeps the bare c-e-n-t spelling tied to that hundred-counting heritage.

How the word is built

• cent (from Latin centum: hundred)

Words that sound like cent

They sound the same but mean different things, so the meaning decides which spelling to write.

• scent: A distinctive smell, especially a pleasant one, or the trail of smell left by a person or animal.
• sent: Past tense of 'send': caused something or someone to be dispatched or conveyed to a destination.