What is the concrete percentage of the words "majority", "sizeable", "large segment" "predominant"?

Question

I always see the words "majority" "large segment", "predominant", "sizeable" in many articles but not know how many the word "sizeable" is in concrete number. I think this is totally judged by feeling. According to my feeling, "majority" may be more than 80%. "predominant", I'm not sure. "large segment" I'm not sure but may be more than 70% according to my feeling. " sizeable" may be about 5-20% but of course not more than 20%. What's your opinion? Can u tell me what CONCRETE precentage of these words (MAJORITY, LARGE SEGMENT, PREDOMINENT, SIZEABLE) are in CONCRETE number according to your FEELING?

Answer 1

A majority is more than 50%. This is a technical term, so this is what I think of when I hear `majority.'

The others depend on the context. Here are what I would guess, completely arbitrarily:

Large segment: 70%+
Predominant: 70%+
Sizeable: 20%+

When I hear "predominant," I definitely think that it applies to *most* of whatever you're talking about. For example, if someone says "In this town, the predominant religion is Christianity," then I'd feel that if I ran into a random person, it'd be a good bet that they were Christian.

The term "large segment" doesn't seem to come up as often. I haven't really got anything much to say about it except what my gut feeling was.

The term "sizeable" seems to be often used to indicate that a lot more things--a significant number--have this property than a lot of people realize. For example, if someone told me "A sizeable number of students failed that class last semester," I would probably think 20% or more.

(Obviously, all of these depend upon the context; I'd get slightly different feelings based on what was being referred to. Except for "majority," because that's a technical term with a definite meaning.)

Answer 2

You're correct, they -do- have a pretty ambiguous meaning. About the only one that you can really 'nail down' is 'majority' which always means 'more than half'. The rest you have to kinda guess at from reading the rest of the work.

Doug