In general, a character is a distinctive significant mark or feature. The word originates from the Greek and Latin caracter, an instrument for marking or graving. The word is used in several specific senses:
- A person's moral predispositions or attitudes; see moral character.
- According to the Tridentine dogmas of catholicism, a supernatural mark made on a person's soul by any of three of the seven sacraments: baptism, confirmation, and holy orders. The character is held to remain indelible during the recipient's life, and therefore each of those three sacraments may be received only once.
- 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.