WRFH/Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM - Grammar Minute: History of the Percent Sign

Episode Date: March 19, 2025

No, it's not just a misprinted 100. And it's not a recent invention. Learn more on today's episode of Grammar Minute!

Welcome to the Grammar Minute, where we're saving the English language 60 seconds out of time. I'm Lauren Smith, and why in the world do we jumble together the numbers in 100 to get the percent sign? Like most punctuation marks we treat as modern inventions, the percent sign is actually quite old. Its earliest recorded use is sometime in the early 1400s when a scribe abbreviated the Italian term percento to PC, with a loop on the end to represent the equivalent of the English TH, as in 100th. Somehow, after 200 years of people scribbling in a hurry, this loopy PC was stylized into a horizontal fraction bar with a zero above and below. By the 1700s, the percent sign looked pretty much the same as it does now, except that fraction bar was horizontal instead of slanted. Again, over several hundred years of hasty scribbling, the bar was eventually tilted and the percent sign as we know it emerged.

That's your Grammar Minute. Visit Thegrammerminit.com for more tips and tricks.