characteristic

Pluralcharacteristics

1. 1
   nouncountable

   A distinguishing feature or quality of a person or thing, including an aspect of mental or physical behavior.

   Stubbornness was a characteristic he inherited from his grandfather.

   Researchers listed several characteristics that set the new species apart from its relatives.

   Similartrait, feature, quality, attribute, property

2. 2
   adjective

   Serving as a distinguishing feature of a particular person or thing; typical of them.

   She answered with characteristic honesty, refusing to soften the bad news.

   A deep blue color is characteristic of glacial lakes.

   Similartypical, distinctive, representative

   Oppositeatypical, unusual

   Note

   Behind it is a Greek verb meaning "to designate by a characteristic mark," built on kharaktḗr, "a mark," the same root as character. The adjective likes to sit between a possessive and a quality: in W. B. Maxwell's The Mirror and the Lamp (1918), the vicar displays "his characteristic bluntness." It also takes of (characteristic of glacial lakes) and compares with more and most.

3. 3
   nouncountable

   In mathematics, the whole-number portion of a logarithm, as distinct from its decimal part.

   Students using log tables found the mantissa in the table and supplied the characteristic themselves.

   For any number between 1 and 10, the characteristic of its common logarithm is 0.

   Note

   A log-table word. Multiplying a number by ten changes only the characteristic, so tables printed just the fractional part and left the reader to supply the whole number. For numbers below one the characteristic is negative: −3 for .003 and −4 for .0003. That is why the logarithm of a sine or cosine, always a proper fraction, carries a negative characteristic.

4. 4
   nouncountable

   For a field or ring, the smallest positive number of copies of the multiplicative identity 1 that sum to the additive identity 0, or 0 if no positive number of copies does.

   Every finite field has a characteristic equal to some prime number.

   The rational numbers have characteristic 0, since no sum of 1s ever equals 0.

   Note

   In algebra the word settles into a fixed phrase with no article: a field of characteristic 0, or of characteristic zero, as in Nathan Jacobson's Lie Algebras (1962). For a field the value is tightly constrained, because a nonzero characteristic must be a prime number. It has nothing to do with the logarithm's integer part, despite sharing the same mathematical shelf.

5. 5
   nouncountable

   The identifying pattern of a navigational light, such as a lighthouse beacon (its color, rhythm, and sequence of flashes) by which mariners can recognize it.

   Sailors identified the harbor light by its characteristic: a green flash every five seconds.

   The chart lists each beacon's characteristic so navigators can tell the lights apart at night.

   Note

   Mariners use the word for a light's whole signature, taken as one thing. Each feature is a characteristic in the everyday noun, but here color, rhythm of flashes and period together make a single characteristic. Charts and light lists print it so a navigator can match the flash seen at night to the beacon on paper. Say "the light's characteristic," singular.

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