Civil Rights
Movements, leaders, victories and the continuing fight for equality.
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THE BHP WIRE —
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Explore the people, places, events, achievements, struggles and stories that shaped our journey.
Movements, leaders, victories and the continuing fight for equality.
Innovation, patents, science, technology and world-changing contributions.
Pioneers, champions, Negro Leagues, records, activism and excellence.
Meet the people whose lives, choices and achievements shaped the journey.
Black towns, communities, institutions and places where history happened.
Moments that changed communities, movements, institutions and the nation.
Wilmington, North Carolina once had a thriving Black middle class and an elected interracial government. In 1898 white supremacists used violence to overthrow that government, kill Black residents and drive many others from the city.
MORE →Reflects the personal views, recollections, and perspective of the author, Mike Davis.
This is a personal recollection on the Move fire on May 13, 1985
| % | |
|---|---|
Percent sign | |
| In Unicode | U+0025 % PERCENT SIGN |
| Different from | |
| Different from | U+2052 ⁒ COMMERCIAL MINUS SIGN U+00F7 ÷ DIVISION SIGN |
| Related | |
| See also | U+2030 ‰ PER MILLE SIGN U+2031 ‱ PER TEN THOUSAND SIGN (Basis point) |
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 ‱. Higher proportions use parts-per notation.
English style guides prescribe writing the percent sign following the number without any space between (e.g. 50%).[1] However, the International System of Units and ISO 31-0 standard prescribe a space between the number and percent sign,[2][3][4] in line with the general practice of using a non-breaking space between a numerical value and its corresponding unit of measurement.
Other languages have other rules for spacing in front of the percent sign:
Prior to 1425, there is no known evidence of a special symbol being used for percentages. 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.[17] The letter p with its descender crossed by a horizontal or diagonal stroke (to indicate abbreviation) conventionally stood for per, por, par, or pur in Medieval and Renaissance palaeography.[18]
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.[19]
The pc with a loop eventually evolved into a horizontal fraction sign by 1650 (see below for an example in a 1684 text)[21] and thereafter lost the per.[20]
In 1925, D. E. Smith wrote, "The solidus form (
) is modern."[22]
The Unicode code points are:
%, %[23]),The ASCII code for the percent character is 37, or 0x25 in hexadecimal.
Names for the percent sign include percent sign (in ITU-T), mod, grapes (in hacker jargon),[24] and the humorous double-oh-seven (in INTERCAL).
In computing, the percent character is also used for the modulo operation in programming languages that derive their syntax from the C programming language, which in turn acquired this usage from the earlier B.[25]
In the textual representation of URIs, a % immediately followed by a 2-digit hexadecimal number denotes an octet specifying (part of) a character that might otherwise not be allowed in URIs (see percent-encoding).
In SQL, the percent sign is a wildcard character in "LIKE" expressions, for example SELECT * FROM table WHERE fullname LIKE 'Lisa %' will fetch all records whose names start with "Lisa ".
In TeX (and therefore also in LaTeX) and PostScript, and in GNU Octave and MATLAB,[26] a % denotes a line comment.
In BASIC, Visual Basic, ASP, and VBA a trailing % after a variable name marks it as an integer.
In ASP, the percent sign can be used to indicate the start and end of the ASP code <%...... %>
In Perl % is the sigil for hashes.
In many programming languages' string formatting operations (performed by functions such as printf and scanf), the percent sign denotes parts of the template string that will be replaced with arguments. (See printf format string.) In Python and Ruby the percent sign is also used as the string formatting operator.[27][28][29]
In the command processors COMMAND.COM (DOS) and CMD.EXE (OS/2 and Windows), %1, %2, ... stand for the first, second, etc. parameters of a batch file. %0 stands for the specification of the batch file itself as typed on the command line. The % sign is also used similarly in the FOR command.
%VAR1% represents the value of an environment variable named VAR1. Thus:
set PATH=c:\;%PATH%
sets a new value for PATH, that being the old value preceded by "c:\;".
Because these uses give the percent sign special meaning, the sequence %% (two percent signs) is used to represent a literal percent sign, so that:
set PATH=c:\;%%PATH%%
would set PATH to the literal value "c:\;%PATH%".
In the C Shell and Z shell, % is part of the default command prompt.
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.[30][31] 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.
Source: Wikipedia. Article content is retrieved live through the MediaWiki API.
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 ‱. Higher proportions use parts-per notation.
The cent is a monetary sub-unit of many currencies that equals a hundredth (1⁄100) of the currency's base unit. The word derives from the Latin centum, 'hundred'. The cent sign is commonly a simple minuscule (lower case) letter c, such as with the euro. In North America, the c is crossed by a diagonal or vertical stroke (depending on typeface), yielding the character ¢. The United States one cent coin is generally known by the nickname "penny", alluding to the British coin and unit of that name. Australia ended production of its 1c coin in 1990. New Zealand last produced its 1c coin in 1988, as did Canada in 2012 and the US (for circulation) in 2025. Some Eurozone countries ended production of the 1 euro cent coin, most recently Slovakia in 2022.
In mathematics, a percentage, percent, or per cent (from Latin per centum 'by a hundred') is a number or ratio expressed as a fraction of 100. It is often denoted using the percent sign (%), although the abbreviations pct., pct, and sometimes pc are also used. A percentage is a dimensionless number (pure number), primarily used for expressing proportions, but percent is nonetheless a unit of measurement in its orthography and usage.
AltGr (also Alt Graph) is a modifier key found on computer keyboards. It is primarily used to type characters that are used less frequently in the language that the keyboard is designed for, such as foreign currency symbols, typographic marks and accented letters. The AltGr key is used to access a third and a fourth grapheme for most keys. Most are accented variants of the letters on the keys, but some are additional symbols and punctuation marks. For example, when the US-International keyboard mapping is active, the C key can be used to insert four different characters: C → c (lowercase — first level) ⇧ Shift+C → C (uppercase — second level) AltGr+C → © (copyright sign — third level) AltGr+⇧ Shift+C → ¢ (cent sign — fourth level) Some languages, such as Bengali, use this key when the number of letters of their alphabet is too large for a standard keyboard. On keyboard layouts that do not include an AltGr key, such as US keyboards, the key position is labelled as a right-hand Alt key. When a relevant keyboard mapping is chosen in the operating system, this key will function separately as AltGr (despite being marked identically to the left-hand Alt key). In macOS, the Option key has functions similar to the AltGr key.
Before the 1921 destruction of Tulsa’s Greenwood District, Black residents had created a remarkable center of business and community life. The district included stores, professional offices, entertainment venues and homes owned by Black citizens. Understanding Greenwood means learning what was built—not only what was burned.
MORE →Shirley Chisholm, elected in 1968.
