The phrase "per centum" is correct and usable in written English, though it is somewhat archaic
It can be used in formal or legal contexts to denote a percentage.
Example: "The interest rate on the loan is set at five per centum annually."
Alternatives: "percent" or "percentage."
According to the Investment Company Act of 1940, any company "engaged [in] or [that] proposes to engage in the business of investing, reinvesting, owning, holding, or trading in securities, and [that] owns or proposes to acquire investment securities having a value exceeding 40 per centum" of the value of companys total assets must register as a mutual fund.
The New Jersey Constitution explicitly says, "The Legislature shall not, in any manner, create in any fiscal year a debt or debts, liability or liabilities … [that] exceed at any time one per centum of the total amount appropriated by the general appropriation law".
Percent is an abbreviation of per centum, which means per hundred.
Hence, Latin centum (/kentum/) gave rise to Italian cento (/chento/), Portuguese cento (/sento/), and Spanish ciento (/siento/ or, in Castilian, /thiento/).
Armenian also shows at least one characteristic of the centum group comprising Celtic, Germanic, Italic, and Greek in that it preserves occasional palatal stops as k-like sounds.
Excellence Holding is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Centum Prata, an investment group that belongs to the al-Rayes family of Riyadh.
(The centum and satem divisions of Indo-European languages are made according to the treatment of certain sounds, called palatals, that existed in the ancestral Indo-European language).
Quite recently, evidence was made available suggesting that Bangani, spoken in the area of Bangan in westernmost Garwhal, Uttarakhand is a centum language within the Indo-Aryan area.
The western group comprising Celtic, Germanic, Italic, and Greek is commonly referred to as the centum group; the eastern group comprising Sanskrit, Iranian, Slavic, and others is called the satem (satəm) group.
(The words centum and satem come from Latin and Iranian, respectively, and mean "hundred". They exemplify, with their initial consonant, the two different treatments of the Proto-Indo-European simple velars).
A few examples: (1) Proto-Indo-European *p, *t, *k, and *kw, as in Latin piscis, tenuis, centum, and quod, became Proto-Germanic *f, *þ, *x, and *xw, as in English fish, thin, hund(red), and what.
