A character is a

semiotic Semiotics ( ) is the systematic study of semiosis, sign processes and the communication of Meaning (semiotics), meaning. In semiotics, a Sign (semiotics), sign is defined as anything that communicates intentional and unintentional meaning or feel ...

sign,

symbol A symbol is a mark, Sign (semiotics), sign, or word that indicates, signifies, or is understood as representing an idea, physical object, object, or wikt:relationship, relationship. Symbols allow people to go beyond what is known or seen by cr ...

grapheme In linguistics, a grapheme is the smallest functional unit of a writing system. The word ''grapheme'' is derived from Ancient Greek ('write'), and the suffix ''-eme'' by analogy with ''phoneme'' and other emic units. The study of graphemes ...

, or

glyph A glyph ( ) is any kind of purposeful mark. In typography, a glyph is "the specific shape, design, or representation of a character". It is a particular graphical representation, in a particular typeface, of an element of written language. A ...

typically a letter, a

numerical digit A numerical digit (often shortened to just digit) or numeral is a single symbol used alone (such as "1"), or in combinations (such as "15"), to represent numbers in positional notation, such as the common base 10. The name "digit" origin ...

, an ideogram, a hieroglyph, a punctuation mark or another typographic mark.

History

The

Ancient Greek Ancient Greek (, ; ) includes the forms of the Greek language used in ancient Greece and the classical antiquity, ancient world from around 1500 BC to 300 BC. It is often roughly divided into the following periods: Mycenaean Greek (), Greek ...

word () is an agent noun of the verb () with a meaning "to sharpen, to whet", and also "to make cake", from a Proto-Indo-European root "cut" also continued in Irish and English ''gash'', which is perhaps an early loan ultimately from the same Greek root. A haracteeris thus an "engraver", originally in the sense of a craftsman, but then also used for a tool used for engraving, and for a stamp for minting coins. From the stamp, the meaning was extended to the stamp impression,

Plato Plato ( ; Greek language, Greek: , ; born BC, died 348/347 BC) was an ancient Greek philosopher of the Classical Greece, Classical period who is considered a foundational thinker in Western philosophy and an innovator of the writte ...

using the noun in the sense of "engraved mark". In

Plutarch Plutarch (; , ''Ploútarchos'', ; – 120s) was a Greek Middle Platonist philosopher, historian, biographer, essayist, and priest at the Temple of Apollo (Delphi), Temple of Apollo in Delphi. He is known primarily for his ''Parallel Lives'', ...

, the word could refer to a figure or letter. Lucian uses it of hieroglyphs as opposed to Greek ''grammata''. Metaphorically, it could refer to a distinctive mark, Herodotus used it of a particular dialect, or of a characteristic mark of an individual. The collective noun "characteristics" appears later, in Dionysius Halicarnassensis. Via Latin , Old French , the word passed into

Middle English Middle English (abbreviated to ME) is a form of the English language that was spoken after the Norman Conquest of 1066, until the late 15th century. The English language underwent distinct variations and developments following the Old English pe ...

as in the 14th century. Wycliffe (1382) has "To a ..in her " for the mark of the beast (translating "imprinted or branded mark"). The word "character" was used in the sense of letter or

by William Caxton, referring to the

Phoenician alphabet The Phoenician alphabet is an abjad (consonantal alphabet) used across the Mediterranean civilization of Phoenicia for most of the 1st millennium BC. It was one of the first alphabets, attested in Canaanite and Aramaic inscriptions fo ...

: . As in Greek, the word was used especially for foreign or mysterious graphemes (such as Chinese, Syriac, or Runic ones) as opposed to the familiar ''letters''; in particular of shorthand (in '' David Copperfield'' (chapter 38) sarcastically of shorthand, "a procession of new horrors, called arbitrary characters; the most despotic characters I have ever known"), and since 1949 in computing (see

character (computing) In computing and telecommunications, a character is the internal representation of a character (symbol) used within a computer or system. Examples of characters include letters, numerical digits, punctuation marks (such as "." or "-"), and ...

). As a collective noun, the word can refer to writing or printing in general ( Shakespeare's sonnet nr. 59: , meaning "since thought was first put into writing").

Graphemes, glyphs and hieroglyphs

A grapheme is a unifying identity for a number of different glyphs, called "

allograph In graphemics and typography, the term allograph is used of a glyph that is a design variant of a letter or other grapheme, such as a letter, a number, an ideograph, a punctuation mark or other typographic symbol. In graphemics, an obvious exa ...

s", that have the same meaning but have specific stylistic characteristics. For example, the letter "g" can be represented by either the

serif In typography, a serif () is a small line or stroke regularly attached to the end of a larger stroke in a letter or symbol within a particular font or family of fonts. A typeface or "font family" making use of serifs is called a serif typeface ( ...

glyph or the

sans-serif In typography and lettering, a sans-serif, sans serif (), gothic, or simply sans letterform is one that does not have extending features called "serifs" at the end of strokes. Sans-serif typefaces tend to have less stroke width variation than ...

glyph . The word '' hieroglyph'' (Greek for sacred writing) dates from an early use in an English to Italian dictionary published by John Florio in 1598, referencing the complex and mysterious characters of the Egyptian alphabet.

Egyptian hieroglyphs Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs ( ) were the formal writing system used in Ancient Egypt for writing the Egyptian language. Hieroglyphs combined Ideogram, ideographic, logographic, syllabic and alphabetic elements, with more than 1,000 distinct char ...

were the formal

writing system A writing system comprises a set of symbols, called a ''script'', as well as the rules by which the script represents a particular language. The earliest writing appeared during the late 4th millennium BC. Throughout history, each independen ...

used in

Ancient Egypt Ancient Egypt () was a cradle of civilization concentrated along the lower reaches of the Nile River in Northeast Africa. It emerged from prehistoric Egypt around 3150BC (according to conventional Egyptian chronology), when Upper and Lower E ...

. Hieroglyphs combined logographic, syllabic and

alphabet An alphabet is a standard set of letter (alphabet), letters written to represent particular sounds in a spoken language. Specifically, letters largely correspond to phonemes as the smallest sound segments that can distinguish one word from a ...

ic elements, with a total of some 1,000 distinct characters.

Esotericism and magic

The word in Renaissance magic came to refer to any astrological, kabbalistic or magical sign or symbol. John Dee (1527 1608), a mathematician and occultist, designed an esoteric

(right), which he described in his 1564 book, : the word hieroglyph is a composite of hiero (holy) and

(a distinct character). In the 19th century, this sense of the word appears mainly in Romantic poetry, such as Sir Walter Scott's ''Lay of the last minstrel'' (1805), where "A hallow'd taper shed a glimmering light / On mystic implements of magic might; On cross, and character, and talisman," (6.17).

Semiotics and epistemology

From the esoteric or mystical meanings, learned authors of the Early Modern period abstracted a notion of ''Character'' as a code or hierarchical system that embodied all knowledge or all of

reality Reality is the sum or aggregate of everything in existence; everything that is not imagination, imaginary. Different Culture, cultures and Academic discipline, academic disciplines conceptualize it in various ways. Philosophical questions abo ...

, or a written representation of a philosophical language that would recover the "

true name A true name is a name of a thing or being that expresses, or is somehow identical to, its true nature. The notion that language, or some specific sacred language, refers to things by their true names has been central to philosophical study as we ...

s" lost in the confusion of tongues. This idea had currency as a kind of epistemological philosophers' stone for about a century, from the mid 17th century, with Francis Lodwick (1642) and John Wilkins's ''Essay towards a Real Character, and a Philosophical Language'' (1668), to the later 18th century and the '' Encyclopédie'' where in a long entry under the heading ''Charactère'', D'Alembert critically reviewed such projects of the past century.

Computing

The same character in the linguistic sense, can be mapped to one or more computer characters depending on the

character encoding Character encoding is the process of assigning numbers to graphical character (computing), characters, especially the written characters of human language, allowing them to be stored, transmitted, and transformed using computers. The numerical v ...

. For example, the Unicode standard maps the same letters from Latin, Greek, and Hebrew alphabets to various duplicate code points in the Letterlike Symbols and other blocks, often meant to represent specific mathematical or scientific uses for that glyph. In some cases, duplicate compatibility characters are provided so that legacy character encodings can be straightforwardly transposed into Unicode, but these duplicate are deprecated.

References