Read along with the three podcasts, or open the full dictionary entry for Per for the definition, Arabic meaning, synonyms and example sentences.
Narrator: Today's word is "per" — preposition, pronounced /pɜː/, with the stress on "per".
Narrator: The word per means for each, or for every, one of something, and it is used when a quantity is divided evenly across units.
Narrator: In plain English, it tells you how much of something belongs to each single item, person, or period of time.
Narrator: It comes straight from Latin, where per meant through, by, or by means of, and it entered English largely through trade, law and accounting.
Narrator: A very common collocation is per cent, literally by the hundred, which describes a proportion out of one hundred.
Narrator: It differs from each, because each stands beside a noun as a determiner, while per links a measured amount to the unit it is measured against, as in sixty miles per hour.
Narrator: It also survives in fixed Latin phrases such as as per usual and per annum, meaning in the customary way and by the year.
Narrator: Engineering, finance, medicine, logistics and software all rely on it, because rates, prices, doses and limits are nearly always expressed per unit.
Narrator: So remember: per means for each, and it turns a raw total into a rate that people can compare.
Speaker A: Why does such a tiny word like per turn up in almost every invoice I read?
Speaker B: Because PER is the workhorse of measurement! It comes from Latin, where it meant through or by means of, and traders loved it for splitting totals into neat, comparable units.
Speaker A: So it is really about rates rather than amounts?
Speaker B: Exactly right. A total tells you how much altogether, while per tells you how much for every single hour, kilo, user or year.
Speaker A: Example sentences?
Speaker B: "The train travels at two hundred kilometres per hour" — that is speed as distance for each hour. "We charge nine pounds per user per month" — that is pricing spread across users and time. "As per your email, I have booked the room" — that is a formal way of saying in accordance with.
Speaker A: Common mistakes?
Speaker B: Do not write "as per usual" in formal reports when plain "as usual" will do, and never confuse the preposition per with the prefix per- in words like percolate. Also, keep per cent as two words in British English, and remember that per is followed by a singular unit, so it is miles per hour, not miles per hours.
Speaker A: Close relatives?
Speaker B: Each is the friendly cousin, every is the near twin in everyday speech, and for every is the plain-spoken alternative when you want to sound less technical. Yet per keeps its brisk, ledger-book Latin charm!
Speaker B: Let's use "per" in AI prompts — useful for building usage-based billing logic and for writing performance dashboards that report rates rather than totals.
Speaker A: How would that apply to a pricing feature?
Speaker B: Ask the model to model a per-unit charge explicitly.
Prompt: Write a TypeScript function that calculates a monthly invoice from a price per user per month, a seat count, and a pro-rata adjustment for mid-month joiners.
Speaker A: And for monitoring a live service?
Speaker B: Make the metric a rate, not a running total.
Prompt: Design a dashboard specification that reports requests per second, errors per thousand requests, and average latency per endpoint for a REST API.
Speaker A: Could it help with protecting an API?
Speaker B: Yes, rate limits are defined entirely in per terms.
Prompt: Implement a rate limiter in Python that allows one hundred requests per minute per API key and returns a clear retry-after header when the limit is exceeded.
Speaker A: One more?
Speaker B: Let's finish with data reporting, where per keeps comparisons honest.
Prompt: Write an SQL query that returns revenue per customer, orders per customer, and average revenue per order for the last twelve months, sorted by revenue per customer.
Per — meaning in Arabic & definition More P courses GL Dictionary