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Concept
Percent sign
Summary
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 (also known as a basis point), which indicate that a number is divided by one thousand or ten thousand, respectively. Higher proportions use parts-per notation.
English style guides prescribe writing the percent sign following the number without any space between (e.g. 50%). However, the International System of Units and ISO 31-0 standard prescribe a space between the number and percent sign, 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:
In Czech and in Slovak, the percent sign is spaced with a non-breaking space if the number is used as a noun. In Czech, no space is inserted if the number is used as an adjective (e.g. “a 50% increase”), whereas Slovak uses a non-breaking space in this case as well.
In Finnish, the percent sign is always spaced, and a case suffix can be attached to it using the colon (e.g. 50 %:n kasvu 'an increase of 50%').
In French, the percent sign must be spaced with a non-breaking space.
According to the Real Academia Española, in Spanish, the percent sign should be spaced now, despite the fact that it is not the linguistic norm. Despite that, in North American Spanish (Mexico and the US), several style guides and institutions either recommend the percent sign be written following the number without any space between or do so in their own publications in accordance with common usage in that region.
In Russian, the percent sign is rarely spaced, contrary to the guidelines of the GOST 8.417-2002 state standard.
In Chinese, the percent sign is almost never spaced, probably because Chinese does not use spaces to separate characters or words at all.
Official source
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