What does percent mean?  One clue is the fact that centum is the Latin word for hundred. So when we say "20 percent," we mean 20 per 100, or 20 out of a hundred.

How much is 25 cents? There's that word again—centum. Twenty-five cents is 25 parts of a hundred cents, or one dollar.

Everything that is expressed in percent is related to 100. And values that are expressed in percent are labeled with the percent sign, %.

A percentage indicates the number of parts in 100.   For example, if 40 out of a hundred cars are colored white, you can say that 40 percent (written as 40%) of cars are painted white. More Examples 6% = six out of a hundred 87% = 87 out of a hundred

Sometimes you will find percents that include fractions and decimal values. Financial reports and mortgage rates, for instance, sometimes include percentages written as 6½ % or 12.3 %. There is nothing tricky about these fractional parts of a percent. They are simply parts of one percent.

You will also find percentages that are less than 1. Examples are 0.1%, 0.125%, and so on. These are nothing more than expressions of small percentages—amounts that are less than 1 out of 100.

Then there is the opposite extreme—percentages that are greater than a hundred.   You might read in the newspaper that the population of a certain kind of bird has increased 110% over the past few years.