Percent

How to spell percent

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce percent

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does percent mean?

1. nounA rate, number, or amount measured as a part of every hundred.

Percent in a sentence

• Only a small percent of the budget went to repairs.

• The bank raised the interest rate by one percent this quarter.

Where does percent come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word comes straight from the Latin phrase per centum, which literally meant 'by the hundred' or 'for each hundred'. Medieval merchants and accountants used it to express proportions out of a hundred, and it passed into English through commercial Italian and French bookkeeping during the 1500s, often written as the two-word phrase 'per cent' with a full stop after 'cent', as if it were an abbreviation of centum. Over time the two parts fused into the single word 'percent', the spelling now standard in American and Canadian usage, while British writing still frequently keeps the older two-word form 'per cent'. The 'cent' element is the same Latin root for a hundred that gives us 'century', 'centimetre', and the coin worth one hundredth of a dollar. Because the original Latin was per centum, the modern symbol % is just a stylised shorthand for that 'out of a hundred' idea.

How the word is built

• per (Latin: by, for each)
• cent (from centum: hundred)