Percentage Calculator

Ugh, maths, right? Well, believe it or not, the world around us is surrounded by percentages. You’ve seen and heard the phrases all the time. Save 10% today only on all our new stock! Buy one at full price and get another one at half price! Get one at £2.50 or buy 3 for £6.00! You can’t get away from this fractional type of maths even if you wanted to. But what is the deal about percentages? Before we get into how you can easily figure them out with this online tool, here is a little bit of history about this useful form of calculating everything from taxes to discounts.

That’s a fact. In Ancient Rome, fractions were often used in calculations. For example, the fractions used at the time were often multiples of 100. The Romans were some of the first people to pay a taxes on goods they purchased. It was Augustus who placed a levy of 1/100th on anything sold at auction. This became known as the centesima rerum venalium. Looking back on it now, it is easy to see that these types of calculations – based on multiples of 100 – were the equivalent of computing percentages in modern times.

In the Middle Ages currency denominations grew and the need to compute fractions with a denominator of 100 became the norm. It was so widely used at this time that by the late 15th century and into the early 16th century published math texts commonly used it for computations. To give you an idea of how these math equations were used, the texts focused on such calculations as methods to figure out profit and loss as well as for calculating interest rates. Once the 17th century arrived, interest rates were quoted in hundredths as the standard.

We all know the term ‘percent’ but the history of it is also quite interesting. It originates from the Latin term per centum, which translates to mean “by the hundred.” Do you sense a theme developing here? Well, per centum evolved from an old Italian term that stood for “for a hundred.” That term was per cento. Over time the “per” part of the term got shortened to just the letter “p” and soon disappeared. The cento part of the term remained but was also abbreviated down to “o o” which also evolved to the symbol we all recognise - %.