Welcome to the Grammar Minute, where we’re saving the English language sixty seconds at a time! I’m Lauren Smyth, 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 quite old. Its earliest recorded use is sometime in the early 1400s, when a scribe abbreviated the Italian term “per cento” to “pc” with a loop to represent the equivalent of the English “th,” as in “one hundredth.” Somehow, after two hundred 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 the fraction bar was horizontal instead of slanted. Again, over several hundred years of hasty scribbling, the bar was tilted and the percent sign as we know it emerged.
Nowadays, we argue over whether there should be a space in front of the percent sign. Some languages, like German and Dutch, have serious legal rules about this.
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