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I'm looking for a word to replace "percentage" for numbers between 0 and 1.

To explain: what I'm actually dealing with are decimals (like 0.12), semantically however they serve the purpose of percentages (the equivalent here being 12%, obviously).

So my number between 0 and 1 is not a percentage but a _______. Any ideas?

This question is similar, but has a different focus; it allows for multiple words, whereas mine needs a single word.

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ephemer
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    Note that “naming, including naming programming variables/classes” are off-topic on this site. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Jan 05 '15 at 15:08
  • I don't understand. In programming, you can name the variables whatever you want. So what exactly is wrong with naming it percent, percentage, prcnt, frct, myLittlePart, etc...? – EFrog Jan 05 '15 at 15:23
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    proportion is one commonly used term for this (as one of the answers to the linked question points out.). If they represent probabilities, use that. – Alan Munn Jan 05 '15 at 15:24
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    @EFrog: If you name it percent, don't come complaining if I jam a value of 27.5 in your variable and break your code. In good programming, you give your variables a meaningful name. – oerkelens Jan 05 '15 at 15:31
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    @oerkelens "Percent" would be quite the meaningful name, considering that's exactly what it is. If that name is already taken in the namespace, however, then obviously it's a bad choice. My point was that you can choose anything as your variable's name. Anyway, my suggestion is grade. – EFrog Jan 05 '15 at 15:36
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    @EFrog: if, as the OP states, a value of 0.12 represents 12%, then percent is a terrible name for your variable. If the value 12 would represent 12%, it would be very meaningful. And naming variables anything you feel like just because you can is a terrible idea and the most common reason why programmers want to kill their predecessors. – oerkelens Jan 05 '15 at 15:38
  • @oerklens We can do this all day. If you feel that your variable's name could be misunderstood in any way, there's usually a way to comment (also a good programming practice) to make notes of what certain functions and variables are for. And 12% is 12/100 is .12. It makes sense. 12 isn't at all equal to 12%; it's equal to 1200%. I would assume programmers know how basic math works. – EFrog Jan 05 '15 at 15:40
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    @EFrog So if on a website that you have to fill out, titled, for example, “Density (in percent)”, you would write “0.12” and expect that to mean a density of 12%? That may make sense to a mathematician, but it makes no sense to me. If a variable named percent or percentage is 0.12, the natural assumption is that it represents 0.12%, or 0.0012. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Jan 05 '15 at 15:51
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    @JanusBahsJacquet Ok, now we're talking about user-input, which is different from other programmers using your code. If you're expecting a user to input a percentage, then A) it doesn't matter what you name the variable in-code because the user never sees it, and B) you should either assume that the user is going to interpret that they should input 12 (so put a "divide by 100" in your code) or explain to the user that they should do that themselves... – EFrog Jan 05 '15 at 15:53
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    @EFrog The user input analogy was simply to make the distinction clearer. The latter half of the comment is not user input-related. If you’re going through someone else’s code and you see a variable named percentage, you will expect the value of that variable to be a percentage, not a decimal fraction. (Discussions like this is why variable naming is off-topic here, incidentally, because they’re not about the English language at all.) – Janus Bahs Jacquet Jan 05 '15 at 15:57
  • @JanusBahsJacquet If you go through someone's code and see a variable named ratio are you expecting to assign it the value 1:10, or proportion the value 3 to 5? Along with the variable name isn't some random cloud of ambiguity. It's accompanied by context as well as an example. And as I stated previously, you can comment it all you like to avoid any confusion. Sometimes there isn't an exact word for what you're looking for. (And I agree.) – EFrog Jan 05 '15 at 16:01
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    All possible numbers 0 to 1 are called unit interval so not only is this off topic, it's also general reference at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_interval and for the first time ever I'm voting to close a question. – Frank Jan 05 '15 at 16:02
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    @JanusBahsJacquet thank you for letting me know, it's not a practice I'm interested in repeating. But regardless of whether it's a variable name or not, as a linguist I'd like to know whether there's a good answer. – ephemer Jan 05 '15 at 16:11
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    @Frank Fulfil your civic duty! (Remember W C Fields who answered 'Who am I votin' for? I never vote for politicians, I vote against 'em!' – Edwin Ashworth Jan 05 '15 at 16:26
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    I have taken the liberty of editing the question to remove references to programming and variables, which makes the question on-topic. @Frank, just because you can find something (if you know where to look) on Wikipedia doesn’t mean it’s necessarily general reference. Unit interval is not defined in any of the online dictionaries I just tried, and even if it were, GR goes the other way: asking “What does X mean?” is GR if you can look up the word in a source made for it, but asking “Is there a word for X?” is not general reference just because the answer is in the dictionary/on Wikipedia. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Jan 05 '15 at 16:27
  • @JanusBahsJacquet Without the variable naming it's now just a maths question and should be asked on a maths site. Closest thing to a dictionary I know of for maths is Wolfram Mathworld http://mathworld.wolfram.com/UnitInterval.html My close vote stays. – Frank Jan 05 '15 at 16:38
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    So my number between 0 and 1 is not a percentage but a number. If you want be more precise, it's a "decimal fraction". – Hot Licks Jan 05 '15 at 16:50
  • @JanusBahsJacquet http://verizonmath.blogspot.com/ :) – Alan Munn Jan 05 '15 at 17:22
  • I call these a portion. A portion is a part of the whole. It makes sense to me that the whole is 1. and that 0.5 would half of the whole. – AturSams Jun 28 '20 at 16:29
  • This question keeps popping up, and my conclusion is that there just isn't a good and well-established English name for these numbers. So for my own coding, I'm making up my own word: unidecimal. :-) – Kal Mar 10 '22 at 23:04
  • OP here: for what it's worth, I'm still using the word proportion to refer to this, years later, thanks to some of the comments and answers here. – ephemer Feb 07 '23 at 14:12

2 Answers2

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Numbers between 0 and 1 are fractions, and fractions expressed as a decimal are decimal fractions.

decimal fraction

a fraction (as .25 = 25⁄100 or .025 = 25⁄1000) or mixed number (as 3.025 = 325⁄1000) in which the denominator is a power of 10 usually expressed by use of the decimal point.

Merriam-Webster

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Andrew Leach
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From a pure linguistics perspective, the answer is "percent".

In mathematics, a percentage is a number or ratio expressed as a fraction of 100. [wikipedia]

0.12 and 12% are as equivalent, as 0.1234 and 12.34% are. If the numbers you are expressing are proportional then percent is as valid as anything else.

Off-topic answer:

However, you question wasn't about linguistics, it was about naming variables in which case percent/ration/unit are all terrible variable names. When naming variables, succinctness is of far less importance than readability. Variable names can be minimised or optimised by the complier, as a programmer your role is writing human readable code first, and machine readable code second.

As a programmer, the variable name should have some better context than a unitless proportion, so re-evaluate what you are storing, determine what the actual value means, and try again (probably on Programmers.SE).

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    So, to summarize, what would you recommend to name a variable? – Ivan Balashov May 28 '17 at 12:44
  • you could simply call it a "probability of 0.5", a number between 0 and 1 can be used as a probability, the % is only to imply a fraction of 100, as in "probability of 50%", the ratio of 50/100 is exacly 0.5 – N. Joppi May 21 '22 at 20:02
  • OP here: FWIW I don't remember exactly but my question was probably about the extent to which something (e.g. an animation) has been completed, like animation.proportionCompleted. The issue with progress and with percent is that "progress" has no unit specification at all, and "percent" seems to be between 0 and 100. I think that's why I was looking for something succinct here – ephemer Feb 07 '23 at 14:17