percent

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for percent is 7 letters long, classified as anadv, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /pəˈsɛnt/. Corpus data places it at rank #974 in overall English word frequency, putting it firmly in the everyday core of the language.The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "For every hundred (used with preceding numeral to form a noun phrase expressing a proportion).".

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 11 documented wrong-spelling variants for percent, with forms such as "eprcent", "pecrent", and "perccent". Each variant represents a distinct typo pattern that appears often enough in corpora to be worth flagging, typically a doubled-consonant error, a silent-letter drop, or a vowel substitution.It also participates in 3 confusable-pair relationships, "perfect", "pervert", "parent", where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From New Latin per centum (“by the hundred”). Root origin matters for spelling because borrowed morphemes (Greek, Latin, Old French, Old English) carry their source-language orthographic conventions into modern English, which is why historical etymology is often the cleanest predictor of whether a cluster like "-ough", "-eau", or "-tion" will appear. For readers arriving here from a spelling check, the authoritative guidance is: the correct English form is percent, spelled P-E-R-C-E-N-T, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.