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percentage

noun

Simple meaning

The amount, number or rate of something, regarded as part of a total of 100.

Pronunciation

Say it like this:

persehntuhj

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US device voice
IPA pronunciation (US)

pɚˈsɛntədʒ

This word is pronounced essentially the same in American and British English, so one transcription covers both.

IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) is a standard way of writing speech sounds.

Word Review

Definition

Everyday modern meanings first, grouped by part of speech.

noun

  1. The amount, number or rate of something, regarded as part of a total of 100; a part of a whole.

  2. A share of the sales, profits, gross margin or similar.

  3. informal

    Benefit or advantage.

Word at a Glance

Difficulty
A2 · Elementary (estimated)
Frequency
Common
Typical Use
General English

Word Aura™

How this word commonly comes across.

Aura for this meaning

This meaning: The amount, number or rate of something, regarded as part of a total of 100; a part of a whole.

Used this way, percentage is a reasonably familiar word that usually carries little praise or criticism of its own. It usually sounds natural in a wide range of settings.

Emotional tone
Neutral
Formality
Neutral
Intensity
Not strongly marked
How common
Moderately common
Connotation
Matter-of-fact
Usage feel
Neutral and straightforward

Word Aura describes common impressions, not a measurement. Tone changes with sentence, speaker, relationship and situation.

More ways to use percentage

  • “What percentage of the population lives in the city?”noun

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Common Patterns and Combinations

How this word naturally appears with others.

Proportion

small percentagehigh percentagelarge percentagepercentage increase

Other combinations

percentage pointpercentage changecertain percentagepercentage distribution

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Word Family

Related forms, grouped by how they connect.

Compound terms

Established multiword terms.

  • percentage pointnounCompound term

    The dot at the left of a decimal fraction.

  • percentage signnounCompound term

    A sign (`%') used to indicate that the number preceding it should be understood as a proportion multiplied by 100.

Related Words

Connected to the same idea, not synonyms.

More about this wordSynonyms, forms, origin

Synonyms

Sense: amount or number or rate of something

portion

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Dictionary data from Wiktionary via the Free Dictionary API. Simple meanings, combinations and word intelligence are built from verified reference data, no AI is used to load this page.