パーセント
ぱーせんと
paasento
= percent; percentage
Paasento is about as close as loanwords get to a direct match — it comes straight from English ‘percent’ and works the same way, attached to a number before the noun it measures. But Japanese didn’t wait for the loanword to talk about proportions: it already had wari (割) and the symbol ％, both of which you’ll meet just as often as paasento itself.
Paasento pairs with a number to state an exact figure: 50 paasento is ‘50 percent,’ 3.2 paasento is ‘3.2 percent.’ The symbol ％ is simply read aloud as paasento, so 20％ and 20パーセント are the same thing on the page. Where Japanese diverges from English is in everyday proportions: wari (割) counts in units of 10 percent, so san-wari (3割) means 30 percent, and it’s the default way to talk about discounts — san-wari-biki (3割引) is ‘30 percent off.’ For finer gradations, bu (分) adds single percentage points on top of a wari figure, so san-wari go-bu (3割5分) is 35 percent. Hanbun (半分, ‘half’) covers the 50 percent case without any percent word at all.
Reach for wari when you’re talking about discounts, proportions, or rough statistics — a sale sign that says ni-wari-biki (2割引) means ‘20 percent off,’ and you’ll see this on price tags far more than paasento. Save paasento for precise, exact figures: interest rates, survey results, weather probabilities. The related noun paasentēji (パーセンテージ, ‘percentage’) is used when you’re talking about the concept of a percentage in the abstract, rather than stating a specific number.
Everyday use
今なら全品20パーセントオフ、つまり2割引です。
Ima nara zenpin nijuppāsento ofu, tsumari niwari-biki desu.
Right now everything is 20 percent off — in other words, a 2-wari discount.
Casual / Social Media
やばい、バッテリーが10パーセントしかない!
Yabai, batterī ga juppāsento shika nai!
Oh no, my battery is only at 10 percent!
Formal / Cultural context
今年の物価上昇率は前年比3.2パーセントでした。
Kotoshi no bukka jōshōritsu wa zennenhi san-ten-ni pāsento deshita.
This year’s inflation rate was 3.2 percent compared to the previous year.
The wari-bu-rin (割分厘) system is older than the loanword paasento and still runs quietly through daily life. It’s most visible in baseball, where a batting average like .321 is written and spoken as san-wari ni-bu ichi-rin (3割2分1厘) — wari for the tenths, bu for the hundredths, rin for the thousandths. A player who is ‘hitting 3-wari’ is batting .300 or better, a benchmark for a strong season, and sports broadcasters use this phrasing without ever saying paasento.
Retail is the other place wari dominates: discount signs almost always read X-wari-biki rather than X-paasento ofu, because round multiples of ten percent are the norm for sales. Paasento takes over wherever a figure isn’t a tidy multiple of ten or needs to read as objective and precise — weather forecasts state rain probability as kōsui kakuritsu 60 paasento rather than in wari, and news reports, government statistics, and product specifications lean on paasento for the same reason. Both systems are taught in school, so a fluent speaker moves between them without thinking twice about which one a given number calls for.