Per

Part of speech: preposition

Pronunciation: /pɜː/

Definitions

1. Designating a measure or quantity allocated to each entity in a collective; portraying relationships between different amounts or values; signifying compliance or adherence to a specific guideline or norm
2. Used to show a relationship between two quantities often expressed as a rate ; employed to specify how something is divided among participants or parts ; utilized to denote conformity with a given law or instruction
3. Functions as a term to relate units or compare amounts in a ratio ; marks the division or assignment of an amount to each individual element ; signals following or obeying a stated condition or guideline

Etymology: Most English speakers meet this preposition in Latin phrases such as "per annum" and "per cent." It comes from the Latin "per," meaning "through" or "by means of." The English senses of rate and distribution, "for each" or "by the unit," grow naturally from that idea of passing a quantity through a unit. A different use of the spelling is much more recent. The American novelist and poet Marge Piercy coined "per" as a gender-neutral pronoun in her novel Woman on the Edge of Time, published in 1979. That pronoun is a separate, modern coinage, and it has never displaced the older preposition in standard English.

Synonyms: by, through, via, according to, for each