We describe how the general mechanism of partial deconfinement applies to large-N QCD and the partially deconfined phase inevitably appears between completely-confined and completely-deconfined phases. Furthermore, we propose how the partial deconfinement can be observed in the real-world QCD with the SU(3) gauge group. For this purpose, we employ lattice configurations obtained by the WHOT-QCD collaboration and examine our proposal numerically. In the discussion, the Polyakov loop plays a crucial role in characterizing the phases, without relying on center symmetry, and hence, we clarify the meaning of the Polyakov loop in QCD at large N and finite N. As a nontrivial test for our proposal, we also investigate the relation between partial deconfinement and instanton condensation and confirm the consistency with the lattice data. As a nontrivial application, we show that computation of the two-point correlator of Polyakov loops in the confined phase reduces to the problem of random walk on group manifold. As a consequence, linear confinement potential with approximate Casimir scaling follows immediately.