Meaning & use
percent
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Meanings
nouncountable
One part out of every hundred, used to show a share or rate.
Grammar: Always comes after a number: fifty percent of the students. The sign % is read as 'percent'.
Patterns
- X percent of something
- X percent of someone/something
- a X percent increase/rise
- X percent higher/lower
About sixty percent of the class passed the exam.
Sales rose ten percent last year.
Only five percent of the water in the bottle was left.
adverb
Used after a number to mean 'in every hundred' when describing an amount or change.
Grammar: Follows the number directly, and often the whole phrase acts like an adverb: prices went up five percent.
Patterns
- go up/down X percent
- increase/decrease by X percent
- be X percent higher/lower than something
House prices fell three percent in June.
Our costs are twenty percent higher than last year.
The number of visitors grew eight percent.
adjectivebefore a noun
Equal to a stated number of parts out of a hundred.
Grammar: Used before a noun, often in business or news writing: a five percent increase.
Patterns
- a X percent increase
- a X percent drop/fall
- a X percent chance
The company announced a two percent pay rise.
There is a ninety percent chance of rain tomorrow.
They offered a ten percent discount on all shoes.
Word forms
| plural | percent |
|---|
Common combinations
- percent of
- What percent of your income goes on rent?
- percent increase
- There was a five percent increase in ticket sales.
- percent chance
- The forecast gives a seventy percent chance of snow.
- up by ten percent
- Electricity bills went up by ten percent.
- a hundred percent
- I agree with you a hundred percent.
Synonyms and how they differ
- percentage
- Use percentage when no number comes first: a high percentage of voters.
- share
- Share is a more general word for a part of something and does not need to be out of a hundred.
- proportion
- Proportion is a formal word for how one amount relates to a whole, often written as a fraction.
Word family
- percentage noun
- An amount stated as a part of a hundred, or a share of something.
- percentile noun
- A value that shows where a score stands compared with the rest of a group.
Commonly confused: percent or per cent? percent or percentage?
percent vs per cent
British English usually writes it as two words, per cent, while American English writes percent as one word.
percent vs percentage
Percent follows a number (ten percent), but percentage stands alone and takes of (a large percentage of people).
Practice
Choose the correct sentence.
Choose one answer.
Percent follows the number directly and has the same form in the plural, so 'five percent' is correct. 'Percentage' cannot follow a number, 'percents' is not a word, and 'percent of' needs something after it.
Make it your own
Write a sentence using “percent”, then check it and compare it with the examples above.