Per mille
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Per mille | |
A per mille[1][2][3] (from Latin per mīlle, "in each thousand"[4]), also spelled per mil,[1][2][3] per mill,[4][5][6] permil,[4] permill,[4] or permille[3] is a sign indicating parts per thousand. Per mil should not be confused with parts per million (ppm).
The sign is written ‰, which looks like a percent sign (%) with an extra zero in the divisor. It is included in the General Punctuation block of Unicode characters:
U+2030 ‰ PER MILLE SIGN (HTML ‰ · ‰).[3] It is accessible in Windows using ALT+0137.
The term occurs so rarely in English that major dictionaries do not agree on the spelling or pronunciation even within a single dialect of English[7] and some major dictionaries such as Macmillan[8] and Longman[9] do not even contain an entry. The term is more common in other European languages where it is used in contexts, such as blood alcohol content, that are usually expressed as a percentage in English-speaking countries.
Examples
Examples of use include:
- Legal limits of blood-alcohol content for driving a road vehicle in some countries: for example: 0.6‰ or 0.2‰.
- Seawater salinity: for example: "the average salinity is 35‰".
- Tunnel and railway gradients (in some countries in Europe)
- Birth and death rates
- Baseball batting averages (colloquially)
- Property taxation rates: the millage rate (U.S.) or mill rate (Canada)
- Expressing stable-isotope ratios - for example: "δ13C was measured at −3.5‰"
- Expressing costs for print and online advertisements which are commonly sold at cost per mille (CPM); this is the common unit for all banner and display advertising
- Frequently used by email service providers to denominate the cost for 1,000 emails delivered as a cost per mille (CPM)
- Fineness of precious metals
Related units
- Percentage point
- Percent (%) 1 part in 100
- Basis point (‱) 1 part in 10,000
- Parts-per notation
- Silver fineness (given as "0.000-fine")
References
- 1 2 Cambridge Dictionary Online. "per mille". Cambridge University Press (Cambridge), 2014. Accessed 31 August 2012.
- 1 2 Oxford Dictionaries: The British & World Dictionary. "per mille" Accessed 1 Aug 2014.
- 1 2 3 4 Unicode. "General Punctuation". 2014. Accessed 5 Aug 2014.
- 1 2 3 4 Oxford English Dictionary, 3rd ed. "per mil, adv." Oxford University Press (Oxford), 2005.
- ↑ eReference. "per mil Archived 2014-08-12 at the Wayback Machine.". Houghton Mifflin. Accessed 31 Aug 2012.
- ↑ Oxford Dictionaries: The American Dictionary. "per mill". Accessed 1 Aug 2014.
- ↑ See entries above
- ↑ Macmillan Dictionary. "No result". Accessed 1 Aug 2014.
- ↑ Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English. "No result". Accessed 1 Aug 2014.