Technically, "percent" should mean "for every hundred". So, I would think that it's perfectly fine to say "150%". However, in common usage, people rarely say percentages greater than a hundred. Is there an official grammarical rule for this?
Tell me more
×
English Language & Usage Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for
linguists, etymologists, and serious English language enthusiasts. It's 100% free, no registration required.
|
closed as not a real question by RegDwighт♦ Mar 16 at 14:18
It's difficult to tell what is being asked here. This question is ambiguous, vague, incomplete, overly broad, or rhetorical and cannot be reasonably answered in its current form. For help clarifying this question so that it can be reopened, see the FAQ.
|
This is not a question of grammar, but of usage. As you note, "percent" means "for every hundred," so there is nothing at all wrong with percent values greater than 100 when discussing proportions, e.g. profits increased by 120%. Like fractions, however, percent values are longer to express than multiples, so for values much greater than 100 you may hear them less frequently:
versus
Percents greater than 100% may also be unsuitable if we are discussing fractions of a whole. To quote The Simpsons:
|
|||
|
|
|
If your salary is $100,000 and mine is $150,000, then I make $150 for every $100 you make. Therefore my salary is 150% of yours. I don't see anything controversial about that. Note however that it would also be correct to say that my salary is 50% higher than yours. However, if you are using percentages to refer to a part of a whole, typically it does not make sense to refer to more than 100% of a whole (unless perhaps something akin to debt is possible). |
|||||||||||||||
|
|
This isn't a question of grammar but of mathematics. But before it gets closed as out of scope, I'll slip in an answer. People often say that percentages greater than 100 make no sense because you can't have more than all of something. This is simply silly and mathematically ignorant. A percentage is just a ratio between two numbers. There are many situations where it is perfectly reasonable for the numerator of a fraction to be greater than the denominator. A common, if trivial, example is when a coach says, "You all have to give 110%!" There's always someone who will reply, "That's nonsense. How can someone give more than 100%?" Most likely the coach doesn't mean this as a literal number, but even if he does: 100% of what? If the coach means that the players should give 110% of the maximum that they are capable of, than that would be impossible by definition. But if he means that they should work 110% as hard as they've ever worked before, that's quite plausible. If the best I've ever done is to tackle 10 of the opposing team's players and this game I tackle 11, then I have done 110% of what I did before. If he means they should work 110% as hard as they THINK they are capable of, that's not necessarily unreasonable. Etc. Sure, if someone says, "110% of dentists prefer our toothpaste", that would clearly be impossible. But, "Sales of our toothpaste this year were 110% of what they were last year" is quite plausible. If last year we sold 100,000 packages and this year we sold 110,000, then sales are 110% of last year's. Even some "percentages of the whole" are meaningful. Like I saw a news story a couple of years ago that said that in a certain city (and I forget the exact number here, but something like ...) 105% of registered voters cast ballots in the election. That is, the total number of votes counted was more than the total number of people registered to vote. Obviously there was some sort of fraud or at least error, people who weren't registered nevertheless voting or people voting twice or someone altering vote totals. But while such a result would not be possible if everyone followed the rules and there were no mistakes, those are two big IFs, and clearly it is mathematically possible for the vote count reported to election officials to total more than the number of legal votes. |
|||
|
|
|
That depends on what you mean by "common usage". There is nothing wrong with percentages greater than a hundred as far as grammar is concerned. However, these percentages are indeed used rarely in "common" speech because not everyone can grasp the notion of 150%. That is, it is not universally understood that 150% is one and a half, although it is universally understood that 50% is half. |
|||||||||||||
|
|
To answer the question, yes and no. In everyday communication to pass on an idea about something greater, fuller than an overflowing pot you may say a percentage over 100%. In places where the mathematical value is given attention or is likely to get attention it is not. |
||||
|
|
