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Symbol for the fraction of a hundred

The percent sign (sometimes per cent sign in British English) is the symbol used to indicate a percentage, a number or ratio as a fraction of 100. Related signs include the permille (per thousand) sign and the permyriad (per ten thousand) sign (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.

It is often recommended that the percent sign only be used in tables and other places with space restrictions. In running text, it should be spelled out as percent or per cent (often in newspapers). For example, not "Sales increased by 24% over 2006" but "Sales increased by 24 percent over 2006".

Prior to 1425, there is no known evidence of a special symbol being used for percentage. The Italian term per cento, "for a hundred", was used as well as several different abbreviations (e. g. "per 100", "p 100", "p cento"). Examples of this can be seen in the 1339 arithmetic text (author unknown) depicted below. The letter p with its descender crossed by a horizontal or diagonal strike (to indicate abbreviation) conventionally stood for per, por, par, or pur in Medieval and Renaissance palaeography. At some point, a scribe used the abbreviation pc with a tiny loop or circle (depicting the ending o used in Italian ordinals, as in primo, secondo; it is analogous to the English th as in 25th). This appears in some additional pages of a 1425 text which were probably added around 1435. The pc with a loop eventually evolved into a horizontal fraction sign by 1650 (see below for an example in a 1684 text) and thereafter lost the per. In 1925, D. E. Smith wrote, "The solidus form is modern."

The ASCII code for the percent character is 37, or 0x25 in hexadecimal.

In linguistics, the percent sign is prepended to an example sentence or other string to show that it is judged well formed (grammatical) by some speakers and ill formed by others. This may be due to differences in dialect or even individual idiolects. This use is similar to those of 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 or pragmatically nonsensical.