characteristic
Pluralcharacteristics
Pluralcharacteristics
- 1A quality or feature that makes one person or thing different from others.
Like a fingerprint: something special that helps you tell one person from another.
Kindness is a characteristic she shares with her mother.
One characteristic of cats is their love of high places.
- 2Typical of a person or thing and helping to show what makes them special.
He greeted us with his characteristic big smile.
A sweet smell is characteristic of fresh bread.
Similartypical, distinctive, representative
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- 3In math, the whole-number part of a logarithm.
Like the dollars in a price: the whole part that comes before the cents.
The characteristic of the logarithm of 500 is 2.
Her math teacher showed the class how to find the characteristic of a logarithm without a calculator.
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- 4The smallest number of 1s that add up to 0 in a number system, or 0 if that never happens.
In clock arithmetic with 5 hours, the characteristic is 5, because five 1s add up to 0.
Ordinary whole numbers have characteristic 0, because adding 1s never gives 0.
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- 5The special pattern of color and flashes that a lighthouse light shows, so sailors can tell which lighthouse it is.
Like a name tag made of light: each lighthouse blinks in its own way.
Each lighthouse has its own characteristic, like two white flashes every ten seconds.
The captain checked the chart to match the light's characteristic with the one she saw.
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Showing meanings only.
Practice
Can you tell the meanings of characteristic apart? Answer 3 quick questions from this page, or write your own sentence and AI will check it.
Origin
From a Greek word meaning to mark something with a special sign. It comes from the Greek word for 'a mark' or 'character'.