How to spell percentage

hear itper·cent·age/pər'sɛntɪdʒ/nounSilent and tricky

What it means: A part of a whole expressed in hundredths.

In a sentence: The percentage of candy I got was bigger than my sister's.

The part people get wrong

Watch for an unstressed vowel that is hard to hear. Often misspelled as precentage or percentige.

Same family: percent, percentage point, percentile, proportion, fraction. If you can spell one, the shared part carries to the others.

Where it comes from: Percentage comes from the word percent, which is from Medieval Latin 'per centum', meaning 'by the hundred'. The ending '-age' turns it into a noun that means 'the amount or rate per hundred'.

Patterns it uses: The unstressed vowel (schwa)

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