Word.ws English Dictionary

51 percent

51 percent noun: a narrow or bare majority.

Noun

51 percent

  1. (US, idiomatic) A narrow or bare majority.
    • But in a political system, everything tends to be a yes-or-no decision; if 51 percent vote yes, it's yes.1975, Milton Friedman, There's no such thing as a free lunch
    • Majority rule, loosely put, is the proposition that 51 percent of the people should be able to get whatever they want.1995, Lani Guinier, The tyranny of the majority

Forms of 51 percent

alternative form51%

Questions about 51 percent

What does 51 percent mean?
51 percent means a narrow or bare majority.
What part of speech is 51 percent?
51 percent is a noun.

Words near 51 percent in the dictionary

  1. 50K
  2. 50Ks
  3. 50s
  4. 50th
  5. 50th District
  6. 51 percent
  7. 51%
  8. 512th note
  9. 5150
  10. 5150ed
  11. 5150ing

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: 51 percent (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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