percentage
Americannoun
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percentages
plural
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a rate or proportion per hundred.
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an allowance, commission, or rate of interest calculated by percent.
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a proportion in general.
Only a small percentage of the class will graduate with honors.
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gain; benefit; profit; advantage.
noun
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proportion or rate per hundred parts
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commerce the interest, tax, commission, or allowance on a hundred items
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any proportion in relation to the whole
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informal profit or advantage
Usage
What is a percentage? Percentage is a rate or proportion per hundred, as in This graph shows the percentage of homes that have a microwave. Percentage is also used more generally to mean any proportion, as in Studies have shown that a large percentage of people love cute animals. A percent is one one-hundredth (1/100) of something. Percentage refers to the rate or proportion of that one hundred. Usually, you will see the word percentage used in math equations or statistics or when someone is measuring the increase and decrease in rates. Informally, percentage can mean a gain or advantage, as in There is no percentage to be gained from lying to the sheriff. Generally, percentage and percent can be used interchangeably when referring to vague proportions. However, the word percentage never follows an exact number. In this case, only percent can be used in The number of pet owners increased by 10 percent. A percentile is any of the possible 100 equal parts a range of values can be divided into. A given percentile means that the percentage of all possible outcomes is lower or lesser than the given percentile. For example, if you score in the 92nd percentile of an exam, you scored higher than 92 percent of all other people who took the exam. Example: After careful measuring, the percentage of people who hated pineapple on pizza was found to be significantly higher than first thought.
Commonly Confused
See percent.
Other Word Forms
Derived Forms
Inflected Forms
Nouns
Etymology
Origin of percentage
Explanation
A percentage is a portion of a whole expressed as a number between 0 and 100 rather than as a fraction. All of something is 100 percent, half of it is fifty percent, none of something is zero percent. To determine a percentage, you divide the portion of the whole by the whole itself and multiply by 100. So if you just ate two pieces of an eight-piece pie, and you want to know what percentage of the pie you consumed, you'd first divide 2 by 8 which equals .25. Then multiply .25 times 100 and get 25 percent. A percentage can also mean a portion of something but only when it has to do with numbers. When you buy furniture, the salesman gets a percentage of what you spend.
Vocabulary lists containing percentage
The SAT: Language of the Test, List 3
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Perfect Ten: Dec, Cent, Mille
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The New SAT: The Language of the Test
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Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
Statistics Jersey said this quarter the island's headline inflation rate was 0.6 percentage points lower than the UK's CPIH, a measure of inflation that includes housing costs, which stood at 3.6%.
From BBC ● Oct. 23, 2026
Delinquencies have ticked up by 0.2 of a percentage point.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Oct. 22, 2026
That category extends beyond generative AI, so the percentage should not be mistaken for a precise measure of AI exposure.
From MarketWatch ● Oct. 22, 2026
Ten-year French bond yields surpassed 5% for the first time since 2002, and the spread over German bunds is more than 1.5 percentage points.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Oct. 22, 2026
Only a small percentage of wild mammal species ended up in happy marriages with humans, by virtue of compatibility on all those separate counts.
From "Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies" by Jared M. Diamond
Trade policy tends to arrive in public dressed in abstraction: percentages, agreements, investigations, duties, markets.
From Salon ● Oct. 7, 2026
There were plenty of times during McCullum's reign as Test coach where those long-odds bets were placed, while Fleming seems much more likely to play the percentages.
From BBC ● Sep. 20, 2026
Those percentages add up to about 6,600 transgender or nonbinary students enrolled out of a total of 301,000.
From Los Angeles Times ● Sep. 19, 2026
Revenue and Ebitda are expected to rise by mid-teen percentages, while free cash flow should be aided by stable annual capital expenditure of about 50 billion ringgit, they say.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Sep. 3, 2026
Elementary schools by and large do manage to teach the basic algorithms for multiplication and division, addition and subtraction, as well as methods for handling fractions, decimals, and percentages.
From "Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences" by John Allen Paulos
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