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The percent sign (sometimes per cent sign in
British English British English (BrE, en-GB, or BE) is, according to Oxford Dictionaries, "English as used in Great Britain, as distinct from that used elsewhere". More narrowly, it can refer specifically to the English language in England, or, more broadl ...
) is the symbol used to indicate a
percentage In mathematics, a percentage (from la, per centum, "by a hundred") is a number or ratio expressed as a fraction of 100. It is often denoted using the percent sign, "%", although the abbreviations "pct.", "pct" and sometimes "pc" are also use ...
, a number or
ratio In mathematics, a ratio shows how many times one number contains another. For example, if there are eight oranges and six lemons in a bowl of fruit, then the ratio of oranges to lemons is eight to six (that is, 8:6, which is equivalent to the ...
as a
fraction A fraction (from la, fractus, "broken") represents a part of a whole or, more generally, any number of equal parts. When spoken in everyday English, a fraction describes how many parts of a certain size there are, for example, one-half, eight ...
of 100. Related signs include the
permille Per mille (from Latin , "in each thousand") is an expression that means parts per thousand. Other recognised spellings include per mil, per mill, permil, permill, or permille. The associated sign is written , which looks like a percent sig ...
(per thousand) sign and the
permyriad A basis point (often abbreviated as bp, often pronounced as "bip" or "beep") is one hundredth of 1 percentage point. The related term '' permyriad'' means one hundredth of 1 percent. Changes of interest rates are often stated in basis points. If ...
(per ten thousand) sign (also known as a
basis point A basis point (often abbreviated as bp, often pronounced as "bip" or "beep") is one hundredth of 1 percentage point. The related term ''permyriad'' means one hundredth of 1 percent. Changes of interest rates are often stated in basis points. If ...
), which indicate that a number is divided by one thousand or ten thousand, respectively. Higher proportions use
parts-per notation In science and engineering, the parts-per notation is a set of pseudo-units to describe small values of miscellaneous dimensionless quantities, e.g. mole fraction or mass fraction. Since these fractions are quantity-per-quantity measures, th ...
.


Correct style


Form and spacing

English style guides prescribe writing the percent sign following the number without any space between (e.g. 50%). However, the
International System of Units The International System of Units, known by the international abbreviation SI in all languages and sometimes pleonastically as the SI system, is the modern form of the metric system and the world's most widely used system of measurement. ...
and ISO 31-0 standard prescribe a space between the number and percent sign, in line with the general practice of using a
non-breaking space In word processing and digital typesetting, a non-breaking space, , also called NBSP, required space, hard space, or fixed space (though it is not of fixed width), is a space character that prevents an automatic line break at its position. I ...
between a numerical value and its corresponding
unit of measurement A unit of measurement is a definite magnitude of a quantity, defined and adopted by convention or by law, that is used as a standard for measurement of the same kind of quantity. Any other quantity of that kind can be expressed as a multi ...
. Other languages have other rules for spacing in front of the percent sign: * In Czech and in Slovak, the percent sign is spaced with a non-breaking space if the number is used as a noun. In Czech, no space is inserted if the number is used as an adjective (e.g. “a 50% increase”), whereas Slovak uses a non-breaking space in this case as well. * In Finnish, the percent sign is always spaced, and a case suffix can be attached to it using the colon (e.g. ''50 %:n kasvu'' 'an increase of 50%'). * In
French French (french: français(e), link=no) may refer to: * Something of, from, or related to France ** French language, which originated in France, and its various dialects and accents ** French people, a nation and ethnic group identified with Franc ...
, the percent sign must be spaced with a non-breaking space. * According to the Real Academia Española, in Spanish, the percent sign should be spaced now, despite the fact that it is not the linguistic norm. Despite that, in North American Spanish (
Mexico Mexico (Spanish language, Spanish: México), officially the United Mexican States, is a List of sovereign states, country in the southern portion of North America. It is borders of Mexico, bordered to the north by the United States; to the so ...
and the US), several style guides and institutions either recommend the percent sign be written following the number without any space between or do so in their own publications in accordance with common usage in that region. * In Russian, the percent sign is rarely spaced, contrary to the guidelines of the GOST 8.417-2002 state standard. * In Chinese, the percent sign is almost never spaced, probably because Chinese does not use spaces to separate characters or words at all. * According to the
Swedish Language Council The Language Council of Sweden ( sv, Språkrådet) is the primary regulatory body for the advancement and cultivation of the Swedish language. The council is a department of the Swedish government's Institute for Language and Folklore ( sv, Inst ...
, the percent sign should be preceded by a space in Swedish, as all other units. * In
German German(s) may refer to: * Germany (of or related to) **Germania (historical use) * Germans, citizens of Germany, people of German ancestry, or native speakers of the German language ** For citizens of Germany, see also German nationality law **Ge ...
, the space is prescribed by the regulatory body in the national standard DIN 5008. * In Turkish and some other
Turkic languages The Turkic languages are a language family of over 35 documented languages, spoken by the Turkic peoples of Eurasia from Eastern Europe and Southern Europe to Central Asia, East Asia, North Asia ( Siberia), and Western Asia. The Turki ...
, the percent sign precedes rather than follows the number, without an intervening space. * In Persian texts, the percent sign may either precede or follow the number, in either case without a space. * In
Arabic Arabic (, ' ; , ' or ) is a Semitic language spoken primarily across the Arab world.Semitic languages: an international handbook / edited by Stefan Weninger; in collaboration with Geoffrey Khan, Michael P. Streck, Janet C. E.Watson; Walter ...
, the percent sign follows the number; as Arabic is written from right to left, this means that the percent sign is to the left of the number, usually without a space. * In
Hebrew Hebrew (; ; ) is a Northwest Semitic language of the Afroasiatic language family. Historically, it is one of the spoken languages of the Israelites and their longest-surviving descendants, the Jews and Samaritans. It was largely preserved ...
, the percent sign is written to the right of the number, just as in English, without an intervening space. This is because numbers in Hebrew (which otherwise is written from right to left) are written from left to right, as in English. *In Dutch, the official rule ( NBN Z 01-002) is to place a space between the number and the sign (e.g. "een stijging van 50 %"), but most of the time, the space is missing (e.g. "een stijging van 50%").


Usage in text

It is often recommended that the percent sign only be used in tables and other places with space restrictions. In running text, it should be spelled out as ''percent'' or ''per cent'' (often in newspapers). For example, not "Sales increased by 24% over 2006" but "Sales increased by 24 percent over 2006".


Evolution

Prior to 1425 there is no known evidence of a special symbol being used for percentage. The Italian term ''per cento'', "for a hundred", was used as well as several different abbreviations (e.g. "per 100", "p 100", "p cento", etc.). Examples of this can be seen in the 1339 arithmetic text (author unknown) depicted below. The letter p with its
descender In typography and handwriting, a descender is the portion of a letter that extends below the baseline of a font. For example, in the letter ''y'', the descender is the "tail", or that portion of the diagonal line which lies below the ''v' ...
crossed by a horizontal or diagonal strike (ꝑ in Unicode) conventionally stood for per, por, par, or pur in Medieval and Renaissance palaeography. : At some point a scribe of some sort used the abbreviation "pc" with a tiny loop or circle (depicting the ending ''-o'' used in Italian ordinals, as in , , etc.; it is analogous to the English "-th" as in "25th"). This appears in some additional pages of a 1425 text which were probably added around 1435. This is shown below (source, ''Rara Arithmetica'' p. 440). : The "pc" with a loop eventually evolved into a horizontal fraction sign by 1650 (see below for an example in a 1684 text) and thereafter lost the "per". : In 1925 D. E. Smith wrote, "The
solidus Solidus (Latin for "solid") may refer to: * Solidus (coin), a Roman coin of nearly solid gold * Solidus (punctuation), or slash, a punctuation mark * Solidus (chemistry), the line on a phase diagram below which a substance is completely solid * ...
form () is modern."


Usage


Encodings


Unicode

The
Unicode Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. The standard, ...
code points are: * (HTML %, %), * , * a.k.a.
basis point A basis point (often abbreviated as bp, often pronounced as "bip" or "beep") is one hundredth of 1 percentage point. The related term ''permyriad'' means one hundredth of 1 percent. Changes of interest rates are often stated in basis points. If ...
* see fullwidth forms * see Small Form Variants * , which has the circles replaced by square dots set on edge, the shape of the digit 0 in
Eastern Arabic numerals The Eastern Arabic numerals, also called Arabic-Hindu numerals or Indo–Arabic numerals, are the symbols used to represent numerical digits in conjunction with the Arabic alphabet in the countries of the Mashriq (the east of the Arab world) ...
.


ASCII

The ASCII code for the percent
character Character or Characters may refer to: Arts, entertainment, and media Literature * ''Character'' (novel), a 1936 Dutch novel by Ferdinand Bordewijk * ''Characters'' (Theophrastus), a classical Greek set of character sketches attributed to The ...
is 37, or 0x25 in
hexadecimal In mathematics and computing, the hexadecimal (also base-16 or simply hex) numeral system is a positional numeral system that represents numbers using a radix (base) of 16. Unlike the decimal system representing numbers using 10 symbols, he ...
.


In computers

Names for the percent sign include percent sign (in
ITU-T The ITU Telecommunication Standardization Sector (ITU-T) is one of the three sectors (divisions or units) of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). It is responsible for coordinating standards for telecommunications and Information Co ...
), mod, grapes (in hacker
jargon Jargon is the specialized terminology associated with a particular field or area of activity. Jargon is normally employed in a particular communicative context and may not be well understood outside that context. The context is usually a partic ...
) , and the humorous double-oh-seven (in INTERCAL). In
computing Computing is any goal-oriented activity requiring, benefiting from, or creating computing machinery. It includes the study and experimentation of algorithmic processes, and development of both hardware and software. Computing has scientific, ...
, the percent
character Character or Characters may refer to: Arts, entertainment, and media Literature * ''Character'' (novel), a 1936 Dutch novel by Ferdinand Bordewijk * ''Characters'' (Theophrastus), a classical Greek set of character sketches attributed to The ...
is also used for the
modulo operation In computing, the modulo operation returns the remainder or signed remainder of a division, after one number is divided by another (called the '' modulus'' of the operation). Given two positive numbers and , modulo (often abbreviated as ) is ...
in
programming language A programming language is a system of notation for writing computer programs. Most programming languages are text-based formal languages, but they may also be graphical. They are a kind of computer language. The description of a programming ...
s that derive their syntax from the
C programming language ''The C Programming Language'' (sometimes termed ''K&R'', after its authors' initials) is a computer programming book written by Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie, the latter of whom originally designed and implemented the language, as well a ...
, which in turn acquired this usage from the earlier B. In the textual representation of URIs, a % immediately followed by a 2-digit
hexadecimal In mathematics and computing, the hexadecimal (also base-16 or simply hex) numeral system is a positional numeral system that represents numbers using a radix (base) of 16. Unlike the decimal system representing numbers using 10 symbols, he ...
number denotes an octet specifying (part of) a character that might otherwise not be allowed in URIs (see
percent-encoding Percent-encoding, also known as URL encoding, is a method to encode arbitrary data in a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) using only the limited US-ASCII characters legal within a URI. Although it is known as ''URL encoding'', it is also used ...
). In SQL, the percent sign is a wildcard character in "LIKE" expressions, for example SELECT * FROM table WHERE fullname LIKE 'Lisa %' will fetch all records whose names start with "". In TeX (and therefore also in LaTeX) and
PostScript PostScript (PS) is a page description language in the electronic publishing and desktop publishing realm. It is a dynamically typed, concatenative programming language. It was created at Adobe Systems by John Warnock, Charles Geschke, Do ...
, and in
GNU Octave GNU Octave is a high-level programming language primarily intended for scientific computing and numerical computation. Octave helps in solving linear and nonlinear problems numerically, and for performing other numerical experiments using a lan ...
and
MATLAB MATLAB (an abbreviation of "MATrix LABoratory") is a proprietary multi-paradigm programming language and numeric computing environment developed by MathWorks. MATLAB allows matrix manipulations, plotting of functions and data, implementat ...
, a % denotes a line
comment Comment may refer to: * Comment (linguistics) or rheme, that which is said about the topic (theme) of a sentence * Bernard Comment (born 1960), Swiss writer and publisher Computing * Comment (computer programming), explanatory text or informat ...
. In
BASIC BASIC (Beginners' All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) is a family of general-purpose, high-level programming languages designed for ease of use. The original version was created by John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz at Dartmouth College ...
,
Visual Basic Visual Basic is a name for a family of programming languages from Microsoft. It may refer to: * Visual Basic .NET (now simply referred to as "Visual Basic"), the current version of Visual Basic launched in 2002 which runs on .NET * Visual Basic ( ...
, ASP, and VBA a trailing % after a variable name marks it as an
integer An integer is the number zero (), a positive natural number (, , , etc.) or a negative integer with a minus sign ( −1, −2, −3, etc.). The negative numbers are the additive inverses of the corresponding positive numbers. In the languag ...
. In ASP, the percent sign can be used to indicate the start and end of the ASP code <%...... %> In
Perl Perl is a family of two high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming languages. "Perl" refers to Perl 5, but from 2000 to 2019 it also referred to its redesigned "sister language", Perl 6, before the latter's name was offic ...
% is the
sigil A sigil () is a type of symbol used in magic. The term has usually referred to a pictorial signature of a deity or spirit. In modern usage, especially in the context of chaos magic, sigil refers to a symbolic representation of the practitioner ...
for hashes. In many programming languages' string formatting operations (performed by functions such as printf and scanf), the percent sign denotes parts of the template string that will be replaced with arguments. (See printf format string.) In Python and
Ruby A ruby is a pinkish red to blood-red colored gemstone, a variety of the mineral corundum ( aluminium oxide). Ruby is one of the most popular traditional jewelry gems and is very durable. Other varieties of gem-quality corundum are called ...
the percent sign is also used as the string formatting operator. In the
command processor A command-line interpreter or command-line processor uses a command-line interface (CLI) to receive commands from a user in the form of lines of text. This provides a means of setting parameters for the environment, invoking executables and pro ...
s
COMMAND.COM COMMAND.COM is the default command-line interpreter for MS-DOS, Windows 95, Windows 98 and Windows Me. In the case of DOS, it is the default user interface as well. It has an additional role as the usual first program run after boot (init proc ...
(DOS) and CMD.EXE (OS/2 and Windows), %1, %2,... stand for the first, second,... parameters of a batch file. %0 stands for the specification of the batch file itself as typed on the command line. The % sign is also used similarly in the FOR command. %VAR1% represents the value of an environment variable named VAR1. Thus: set PATH=c:\;%PATH% sets a new value for PATH, that being the old value preceded by "c:\;". Because these uses give the percent sign special meaning, the sequence %% (two percent signs) is used to represent a literal percent sign, so that: set PATH=c:\;%%PATH%% would set PATH to the literal value "c:\;%PATH%". In the
C Shell The C shell (csh or the improved version, tcsh) is a Unix shell created by Bill Joy while he was a graduate student at University of California, Berkeley in the late 1970s. It has been widely distributed, beginning with the 2BSD release of th ...
, % is part of the default
command prompt Command Prompt, also known as cmd.exe or cmd, is the default command-line interpreter for the OS/2, eComStation, ArcaOS, Microsoft Windows (Windows NT family and Windows CE family), and ReactOS operating systems. On Windows CE .NET 4.2, ...
.


In linguistics

In linguistics, the percent sign is prepended to an example string to show that it is judged well-formed by some speakers and ill-formed by others. This may be due to differences in
dialect The term dialect (from Latin , , from the Ancient Greek word , 'discourse', from , 'through' and , 'I speak') can refer to either of two distinctly different types of linguistic phenomena: One usage refers to a variety of a language that is ...
or even individual
idiolect Idiolect is an individual's unique use of language, including speech. This unique usage encompasses vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation. This differs from a dialect, a common set of linguistic characteristics shared among a group of people ...
s. This is similar to the
asterisk The asterisk ( ), from Late Latin , from Ancient Greek , ''asteriskos'', "little star", is a typographical symbol. It is so called because it resembles a conventional image of a heraldic star. Computer scientists and mathematicians often voc ...
to mark ill-formed or reconstructed strings, the
question mark The question mark (also known as interrogation point, query, or eroteme in journalism) is a punctuation mark that indicates an interrogative clause or phrase in many languages. History In the fifth century, Syriac Bible manuscripts used ...
to mark strings where well-formedness is unclear, and the
number sign The symbol is known variously in English-speaking regions as the number sign, hash, or pound sign. The symbol has historically been used for a wide range of purposes including the designation of an ordinal number and as a ligatured abbreviati ...
to mark strings that are syntactically well-formed but semantically nonsensical.


See also

* Metacharacter


Notes


References

* * {{DEFAULTSORT:Percent Sign Mathematical symbols Typographical symbols