Character

In general, a character is a distinctive significant mark or feature. The word originates from the Greek word χαρακτηρ via the Latin word character, an instrument for marking or graving. The word is used in several specific senses:

• A person's moral predispositions or attitudes; see moral character[?] and Losers in literature.
• In Catholicism, a supernatural mark made on a person's soul by some sacraments; see sacramental character.
• A fictional person from a book, play, or other fictional work; see fictional character.
• A grapheme such as a letter, Chinese ideogram, numeral; or punctuation mark.
• In computing, a unit of information in computer storage or communications; see character (computing).
• In mathematics, the word is used in two related senses:
  • a homomorphism from an abelian group into the multiplicative group of the field of complex numbers.
  • a function that describes a group representation by associating to each group element the trace of the corresponding matrix. This generalizes the above meaning to non-abelian groups.
  • See also Dirichlet character.

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