How to type Percent Sign
% is Shift + 5, in the same place on US and UK keyboards. Alt + 37 on the numeric keypad produces it on any Windows layout, which is the way in when the keyboard in front of you has no key for it, and % writes it in HTML. Its codepoint is U+0025.
Percent Sign
- Copy it
- Unicode
- U+0025
- Windows
- Alt + 37
| Where | Shortcut | How |
|---|---|---|
| Windows | Alt + 37 | Hold Alt and type the number on the numeric keypad. |
| HTML | % | Paste this into HTML source. |
| Unicode | U+0025 | PERCENT SIGN |
Symbols related to Percent Sign
The Unicode code chart points from % to ‰ and ‱.
Other math symbols
% lives in the Basic Latin block (U+0000-U+007F), the original ASCII set: the letters, digits and punctuation printed on a US keyboard. Within Unicode it is classified as Po, a punctuation mark. Its bidirectional class makes it a European number terminator, so it sits beside a number without breaking its direction.
What Percent Sign is used for
In mathematical notation % is an ordinary symbol: it carries no special spacing and sits in an expression the way a letter does, standing for a thing rather than doing something to the things around it. That is the classification unicode-math gives it, and it is what decides how the symbol is set: $\mathpercent$ in LaTeX, in maths mode rather than in a sentence.
Unicode publishes a second list of names for % in CLDR, the keywords its own search data offers rather than the formal name, and they are cent, per and per-cent. Those words are what somebody looking for this character is liable to type when Percent Sign is not the name they know it by, and the search on the symbol lists matches them as well as the Unicode name.
What Unicode says about Percent Sign
The code chart points from % to Per Mille, Per Ten Thousand, arabic percent sign (U+066A) and commercial minus sign (U+2052). These are the characters the standard thinks you might have meant instead, which makes them the ones worth checking when Percent Sign looks nearly right but not quite.
How Percent Sign behaves in software
% takes one column in a terminal. It carries no direction of its own, so in a line that mixes English with Arabic or Hebrew it takes the direction of the text around it rather than forcing one.
What people ask about Percent Sign
Where to put the percent sign?
Shift + 5, on both US and UK layouts. Alt + 37 on the numeric keypad also produces it.
Every way to write Percent Sign
| Form | Value |
|---|---|
| Codepoint | U+0025 |
| Decimal | 37 |
| UTF-8 bytes | 25 |
| UTF-16 bytes | 00 25 |
| HTML entity | % |
| HTML numeric | % or % |
| CSS | \0025 |
| JavaScript | \u0025 |
| Python | \u0025 |
| URL-encoded | %25 |
| LaTeX, in prose | \% |
| LaTeX, in maths mode | $\mathpercent$ |
| SVG | 0025.svg · (SIL Open Font License) |
If % needs escaping
% is one byte in ASCII, in UTF-8 and in every code page in common use, so it never arrives corrupted. Its problem is the opposite one: it means something to the software reading it. In HTML it can be written %, in a URL it is %25, and inside a CSV field, a shell command or a regular expression it has to be quoted or escaped rather than typed plainly. That is also why % is the character people substitute when the one they wanted will not type.