percent

Etymology

From New Latin per centum (“by the hundred”).

adv

1. For every hundred (used with preceding numeral to form a noun phrase expressing a proportion).
   Diane Watson has had a distinguished career in education and politics, and last year was elected to the House of Representatives, winning 75 percent of the vote in her Congressional district. 8 May 2002, Leon Jaroff, Time
   In Sichuan the rates were much higher. In Kaixian county, a close examination by a team sent by the provincial party committee at the time concluded that in Fengle commune, where 17 per cent of the population had perished in less than a year, up to 65 per cent of the victims had died because they were beaten, punished with food deprivation or forced into committing suicide. 2011, Frank Dikötter, Mao's Great Famine, Bloomsbury, →OCLC, →OL, pages 297–298
   Twelve percent of the world’s population now relies directly or indirectly on the fisheries industry. 7 July 2016, Arthur Neslen, The Guardian

noun

1. A percentage, a proportion (especially per hundred).
   only a small percent attain the top ranks
2. One part per hundred; one percent.
   And from 1966, under Regulation Q, there was a ceiling of 5.5 per cent on their deposit rates, a quarter of a per cent more than banks were allowed to pay. 2008, Niall Ferguson, The Ascent of Money, Penguin, page 254
3. The percent sign, %.
4. An annuity or security with a certain fixed and guaranteed annual percentage rate of return or percentage dividend.
   […]Several stocks in the Three Per Cents and Three Per Cents Reduced to be transferred into the name and to the credit of the prosecutor, without any authority to him (the traverser) to sell, negotiate, transfer or pledge the said 9000l. Three-and-a-Quarter per Cent. Annuities. 1848, Edward W. Cox, Esq., of the Middle Temple, Barrister at Law, editor, Reports of Cases in Criminal Law Argued and Determined in All the Courts of England and Ireland: Volume II 1868 to 1848, page 371
   Why, from the pleasant and businesslike manner in which the transaction is carried out, it might be a large purchase in the three per cents. Yet what a piece of work a man makes of his first "pop." 1886, Jerome K. Jerome, “On Being Hard Up”, in Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow
   picking up on a phrase that was used as early as 1752, Benjamin Disraeli famously referred to the “sweet simplicity of the three percents in his novel Endymion (1880) because of the reliable dividend this form of investment provided. 2018, Nancy Henry, Women, Literature and Finance in Victorian Britain: Cultures of Investment, page 33