Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun A unit of currency equal to 1/100 of various currencies, including the US dollar and the euro.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun A hundred.
  • noun The hundredth part of a dollar, a rupee, or a florin; especially, in the United States, a coin of copper, or copper and nickel, whose value is the hundredth part of a dollar, or about the same as an English half-penny.
  • noun An old superficial measure of Belgium, the hundredth part of the bonnier.
  • noun An old game at cards: so called “because 100 was the game” (Nares). Also spelled sant and saint.
  • noun An abbreviation of central;
  • noun of centigrade;
  • noun of century.
  • noun A name of various coins reckoned as the hundredth part of a dollar.
  • noun An abbreviation of Latin centum, a hundred: used in per cent. for per centum (in or by the hundred): as, interest at 10 per cent.; fifty per cent. of the population.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun A hundred.
  • noun A United States coin, the hundredth part of a dollar, formerly made of copper, now of copper, tin, and zinc.
  • noun An old game at cards, supposed to be like piquet; -- so called because 100 points won the game.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun money A subunit of currency equal to one-hundredth of the main unit of currency in many countries. Symbol: ¢.
  • noun informal A small sum of money.
  • noun money A subunit of currency equal to one-hundredth of the euro.
  • noun money A coin having face value of one cent (in either of the above senses).
  • noun music A hundredth of a half step.
  • abbreviation century

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun a coin worth one-hundredth of the value of the basic unit
  • noun a fractional monetary unit of several countries

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Middle English, from Old French, hundred, from Latin centum; see dekm̥ in Indo-European roots.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From Old French cent, from Latin centum, from Proto-Indo-European *ḱm̥tóm.

Support

Help support Wordnik (and make this page ad-free) by adopting the word cent.

Examples

Comments

Log in or sign up to get involved in the conversation. It's quick and easy.

  • French for 'hundred'.

    January 9, 2008

  • In music, Wikipedia tells us, the cent "is a logarithmic unit of measure used for musical intervals. Typically cents are used to measure extremely small intervals, or to compare the sizes of comparable intervals in different tuning systems, and in fact the interval of one cent is much too small to be heard between successive notes."

    Specifically, "1200 cents are equal to one octave — a frequency ratio of 2:1 — and an equally tempered semitone (the interval between two adjacent piano keys) is equal to 100 cents."

    February 2, 2010