Word
percentile
Phoneticsper·centile
US/pɝˈsɛnˌtaɪɫ/
UK/pəsˈɛntaɪl/
Definition
n. a number that shows where you stand in a group of 100 people. If you are in the 90th percentile, you did better than 90 percent of the group.
n. a measure indicating the value below which a given percentage of observations in a group falls. Often used to compare individual performance against a larger population.
Examples
“Her test score is in the 95th percentile.”
“Doctors use growth charts to see if a child's height is in a healthy percentile for their age.”
“While the raw score was impressive, being in the 99th percentile confirmed that the candidate was among the most elite performers in the country.”
Examples
simple
“Her test score is in the 95th percentile.”
contextual
“Doctors use growth charts to see if a child's height is in a healthy percentile for their age.”
complex
“While the raw score was impressive, being in the 99th percentile confirmed that the candidate was among the most elite performers in the country.”
Usage
Usually preceded by an ordinal number (e.g., 10th, 50th, 90th) and the definite article 'the'.
Pitfall
He got a 90 percentile on the test
He was in the 90th percentile
A percentile is a position in a ranking, not the score itself; it requires an ordinal number and the preposition 'in'.
Real-World Examples
“His estimated size had dropped from the 14th to the 10th percentile – in other words, he was now smaller than approximately 90% of babies at the same stage of pregnancy.” “They defined extreme heat as anything above the 90th percentile of recorded temperatures at that time of day between 1981 and 2010.” Etymology
Coined by Francis Galton in 1885, from percent + -ile.
Etymology adapted from Wiktionary, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Domain
Scan code
englishreference.com/q/percentile