Grammar
N포인트
Meaning
IntermediateN pointeu
포인트 is the unit Korean uses for the arithmetic gap between two percentages. A rate that moves from 32.2% to 38.1% has risen 5.9%포인트, and the very same move is a rise of about 18% in relative terms — both statements are true of one number, which is why the unit exists at all. Korean reaches for it whenever the thing being measured is itself a rate (an approval rating, an unemployment rate, a market share, a policy interest rate), keeping 퍼센트 for the change and 포인트 for the difference so the two sizes cannot be mistaken for each other. The same word is also the unit a stock index is quoted in, as in 코스피가 20포인트 올랐다, where percentages are not involved at all.
Form
Numeral + 포인트, written solid after the figure: 3%포인트, 0.25%포인트, 5.9%포인트. The numeral is read Sino-Korean and decimals are ordinary in this frame (0.25 is 영 점 이오). Three notations circulate for one thing — %포인트, the abbreviation %p, and the fully spelled 퍼센트포인트 — with headlines and tables preferring the short ones for room. 포인트 is a counter noun, so it takes the particles a noun takes and heads a phrase on its own: 3%포인트 올랐다, 3%포인트 차이, 기준금리 0.25%포인트 인하.
Examples
지지율이 3%포인트 올랐습니다.
Support rose by three percentage points.
Common mistakes & nuance
Two operations, one event. A 포인트 figure is a subtraction: a rate going 5% → 7% has risen 2%포인트. The percentage figure for that same move is a division: 7 over 5 is a 40% rise. Both sentences describe the identical change, and 40 is twenty times the size of 2, so rendering %포인트 as 'percent' does not blur a claim, it replaces it with a different one. Korean marks the difference exactly where it would otherwise be unreadable — 실업률, 지지율, 점유율, 기준금리 are all already percentages, and a bare 2% 올랐다 about one of them is genuinely ambiguous. The trap for a learner is that 포인트 is also the unit of an index, so 코스피가 30포인트 내렸다 counts the index's own points and has nothing to do with rate gaps; nothing in the word tells you which reading applies, only what is being measured does. And when a rate story gives a plain % with no 포인트 anywhere, check whether two rates are being differenced before you read the number as a gap.
Similar grammar
- N 대비
대비 names the baseline a percentage is measured against (전년 대비 5% 증가), so the number after it is always a relative change. 포인트 needs no baseline at all, because it is one rate minus another. The two regularly sit in the same paragraph describing one move: a share that went from 32.2% to 38.1% is 5.9%포인트 higher and, 전년 대비, about 18% higher.
- N보다 N 배
Both size a change without stating a percentage, from opposite directions: 배 multiplies, 포인트 subtracts. 두 배로 늘었다 carries the same information as a 100% rise, while a rate moving 1% → 2% is a rise of 1%포인트 that also happens to be a doubling. Neither of those is a 1% rise, which is the reading a learner falls into by translating the unit away.