The percent sign (%) is the symbol used to indicate a percentage (that the preceding number is divided by one hundred). It is represented in Unicode by U+0025. The percent sign. ... The Unicode Standard, Version 5. ...

Related signs include the permille (per thousand) sign ‰ (Unicode: U+2030) and the permyriad (per ten thousand) sign ‱ (Unicode: U+2031; also known as a basis point), which indicate that a number is divided by one thousand or ten thousand respectively. Higher proportions use parts-per notation. A permille or per mille is a tenth of a percent or one part per thousand. ... A basis point (often denoted as bp, bps or ; rarely, permyriad) is a unit that is equal to 1/100th of 1%. It is commonly used to denote the change in a financial instrument, or the difference (spread) between two interest rates; although it may be used in any case... A basis point (often denoted as bp, bps or ; rarely, permyriad) is a unit that is equal to 1/100th of 1%. It is commonly used to denote the change in a financial instrument, or the difference (spread) between two interest rates; although it may be used in any case... The parts-per notations are used to denote low concentrations of chemical elements. ...

Correct style

Spacing

There is no consensus as to whether or not to include a space between the number and percent sign in English. Wikipedia's Manual of Style prescribes that there should be no space, as do other authorities. The International System of Units and the ISO 31-0 standard require a space, and the TeX typesetting system encourages it.^[1][2][3] This is in accordance with the general rule of adding a non-breaking space between a numerical value and its corresponding unit of measurement. However, style guides – such as the Chicago Manual of Style – commonly prescribe to write the number and percent sign without any space in between.^[4] A manual of style is also called a style guide; see that article for an account of manuals of style generally. ... “SI” redirects here. ... ISO 31-0 is the introductory part of international standard ISO 31 on quantities and units. ... TeX (IPA: as in Greek, often in English; written with a lowercase e in imitation of the logo) is a typesetting system created by Donald Knuth. ... This article or section does not cite its references or sources. ... This article discusses the use of the word Number in Mathematics. ... Measurement is the determination of the size or magnitude of something. ... The Chicago Manual of Style (CMS) is a highly regarded style guide for American English, dealing with questions of style, manuscript preparation, and, to a lesser degree, usage. ...

In some languages, however, there are specific rules of spacing in front of the percent sign. In Czech, for example, the percent sign is spaced if the number is used as a noun, while no space is inserted if the number is used as an adjective (e.g. "a 50% increase"). 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 %'). Nouns in the Finnish language have a large number of grammatical cases, which are detailed here. ... The colon (:) is a punctuation mark, visually consisting of two equally sized dots centered on the same vertical line. ...

Evolution

The factual accuracy of this section is disputed. Please see the relevant discussion on the talk page

The symbol evolved from a symbol similar except for a horizontal line instead of diagonal (c. 1650), which in turn evolved from an abbreviation of "P cento" (c. 1425, from the Italian per cento "for a hundred").^[5] Image File history File links Emblem-important. ... Year 1650 (MDCL) was a common year starting on Saturday (link will display the full calendar) of the Gregorian calendar (or a common year starting on Tuesday of the 10-day slower Julian calendar). ... Events Foundation of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium Births John II, Duke of Lorraine (died 1470) Edmund Sutton, English nobleman (died 1483) Deaths January 18 - Edmund Mortimer, 5th Earl of March, English politician (born 1391) March 17 - Ashikaga Yoshikazu, Japanese shogun (born 1407) May 24 - Murdoch Stewart, 2nd Duke of...

"%" in the 15th century, an abbreviation of per cento Image File history File links Percent_symbol_in_1425. ...

"%" in the 17th century, with only the o from cento remaining Image File history File links Percent_symbol_in_1650. ...

"%" as soon as the 18th century; note the diagonal line Image File history File links Percent_18e. ...

A different reference^[6] tells a similar story. The phrase "per cento" had several different abbreviations (e.g. "per 100", "p 100", "p cento", etc.). At some point a scribe of some sort used the abbreviation "pc" with a tiny loop (used in Italian numeration for primo, secondo, etc.). The "pc" with a loop eventually evolved a horizontal fraction sign and lost the "per". In modern times, we use a solidus instead of the horizontal fraction bar. A solidus, oblique or slash, /, is a punctuation mark. ...

Usage

In computers

In Unicode, there is also an "ARABIC PERCENT SIGN" ("٪"U+066A), which has the circles replaced by square dots set on edge. The Unicode Standard, Version 5. ...

In computing, the percent character is also used for the modulo operation in programming languages that derive their syntax from the C programming language, which in turn acquired this usage from the earlier B programming language.^[7] The ASCII code for the percent character is 37, or 0x25 in hexadecimal. In the textual representation of URIs, a % immediately followed by a 2-digit hexadecimal number denotes an octet specifying (part of) a character that might otherwise not be allowed in URIs (see percent-encoding). Names for the percent sign include percent sign (in ITU-T), mod, grapes (in hacker jargon), and the humorous double-oh-seven (in INTERCAL). RAM (Random Access Memory) Look up computing in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... In computing, the modulo operation finds the remainder of division of one number by another. ... A programming language is an artificial language that can be used to control the behavior of a machine, particularly a computer. ... C is a general-purpose, block structured, procedural, imperative computer programming language developed in 1972 by Dennis Ritchie at the Bell Telephone Laboratories for use with the Unix operating system. ... B was the name of a programming language developed at Bell Labs. ... There are 95 printable ASCII characters, numbered 32 to 126. ... In mathematics and computer science, hexadecimal, base-16, or simply hex, is a numeral system with a radix, or base, of 16, usually written using the symbols 0–9 and A–F, or a–f. ... A Uniform Resource Identifier (URI), is a compact string of characters used to identify or name a resource. ... In mathematics and computer science, hexadecimal, base-16, or simply hex, is a numeral system with a radix, or base, of 16, usually written using the symbols 0–9 and A–F, or a–f. ... Percent-encoding, also known as URL encoding, is a mechanism for encoding information in a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) under certain circumstances. ... The ITU Telecommunication Standardization Sector (ITU-T) coordinates standards for telecommunications on behalf of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) and is based in Geneva, Switzerland. ... This article is about computer hacking. ... For the glossary of hacker slang, see Jargon File. ... Jimbo Lyon, one of the authors of INTERCAL INTERCAL, programming language parody, is the canonical esoteric programming language created by Don Woods and James M. Lyon, two Princeton University students, in 1972. ...

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 "Lisa " SQL (IPA: or IPA: ), commonly expanded as Structured Query Language, is a computer language designed for the retrieval and management of data in relational database management systems, database schema creation and modification, and database object access control management. ... The term wildcard character has the following meanings: // In telecommunications, a wildcard character is a character that may be substituted for any of a defined subset of all possible characters. ...

In TeX and PostScript, a % denotes a line comment. TeX (IPA: as in Greek, often in English; written with a lowercase e in imitation of the logo) is a typesetting system created by Donald Knuth. ... For the literary term, see Postscript. ... In computing, a comment is information in a file that is generally ignored but may be helpful to human users of the file. ...

In Basic, a trailing % after a variable name marks it as an integer. Screenshot of Atari BASIC, an early BASIC language for small computers. ... The integers are commonly denoted by the above symbol. ...

In the command processors COMMAND.COM (DOS) and CMD.EXE (OS/2 and Windows), %1, %2,... stand for the first, second,... parameters of a batch file. %VAR1% represents the value of an environment variable named VAR1. Thus: A command line interpreter is a computer program which reads lines of text that the user types and interprets them in the context of a given operating system or programming language. ... COMMAND.COM is the name for the default operating system shell (or command line interpreter) for DOS and 16/32bits versions of Windows (95/98/98 SE/Me). ... This article needs additional references or sources for verification. ... Wikibooks has more about this subject: Guide to Windows commands In MS-DOS, OS/2 and Windows, a batch file is a text file containing a series of commands intended to be executed by the command interpreter. ... Environment variables are a set of dynamic values that can affect the way running processes will behave on a computer. ...

 set PATH=c:;%PATH% 

sets a new value for PATH, the old value preceded by "c:;".

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 or even individual idiolects. This is similar to the asterisk to mark ill-formed strings, the question mark to mark strings where well-formedness is unclear, and the number sign to mark strings that are syntactically well-formed but semantically nonsensical. In computer programming and formal language theory, (and other branches of mathematics), a string is an ordered sequence of symbols. ... The term well-formed, when used by itself, can refer to: A formula in logic: see WFF The way in which an HTML tag has been used in web page design: see well-formed tag This is a disambiguation page — a navigational aid which lists other pages that might... A dialect (from the Greek word διάλεκτος, dialektos) is a variety of a language characteristic of a particular group of the languages speakers. ... An idiolect is a variety of a language unique to an individual. ... An asterisk (*), is a typographical symbol or glyph. ... The question mark(?) (also known as an interrogation point, query,[1] or eroteme) is a punctuation mark that replaces the full stop at the end of an interrogative sentence. ... Number sign is one name for the symbol #, and is the preferred Unicode name for the codepoint represented by that glyph. ...

See also

• Punctuation
• Special characters

The term punctuation has two different linguistic meanings: in general, the act and the effect of punctuating, i. ... A quick access to special characters, especially unicode graphical characters, the high density of graphical characters per squared centimeters of screen is seen as an excellent browsing tool, however the raw numbers of each group also greatly benefit from a semantic description of its content // 0000 ! # $ % & ( ) * + , - . / 0 1 2 3...

References

1. ^ The International System of Units. International Bureau of Weights and Measures (2006). Retrieved on 2007-08-06.
2. ^ Quantities and units – Part 0: General principles. International Organization for Standardization (1999-12-22). Retrieved on 2007-01-05.
3. ^ Heldoorn, Marcel (2002-08-01). The SIunits package (PDF). Comprehensive TeX Archive Network. Retrieved on 2007-01-05.
4. ^ The Chicago Manual of Style. University of Chicago Press (2003). Retrieved on 2007-01-05.
5. ^ Weaver, Douglas. The History of Mathematical Symbols. Retrieved on 2006-07-18.
6. ^ U+0025 PERCENT SIGN.
7. ^ Thompson, Ken (1996). Users' Reference to B.