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:
The typical overactive investor trails that simple portfolio by about 1.5 percentage points a year.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Sep. 24, 2026
However, reports on their usage suggest they represent only a small percentage of the millions of drones both sides have deployed to date.
From Salon ● Sep. 24, 2026
Economists at JPMorgan Chase this week estimated that higher energy prices might have dropped the savings rate by 0.5 percentage point between February and September.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Sep. 24, 2026
The researchers calculated that, during unified governments since 1871, the U.S. stock market has outperformed its return during divided governments by 7.05 annualized percentage points.
From MarketWatch ● Sep. 23, 2026
African Americans constituted only 15 percent of current drug users in 1995, and they constitute roughly the same percentage today.
From "The New Jim Crow" by Michelle Alexander
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
But another time trial on stage 18 could give him the chance for victory when hot favourite and joint most successful Tour de France winner Pogacar, 27, could be riding for percentages.
From BBC ● Aug. 22, 2026
In a few instances, it determined that single-digit percentages of my writing were either A.I.-generated or A.I.-assisted.
From Slate ● Aug. 18, 2026
This week she highlighted 10 areas in the U.S. with the highest percentages of home sellers asking for less than they paid for the properties.
From MarketWatch ● Aug. 14, 2026
Unfortunately, they don’t do as effective a job in teaching when to add or subtract, when to multiply or divide, or how to convert from fractions to decimals or percentages.
From "Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences" by John Allen Paulos
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
