Merkmal

Merkmal (plural Merkmale) is a German noun that denotes a characteristic, feature, attribute, or trait of a subject. It derives from the verb merken (“to notice, to mark”) with the suffix -mal, and is used across various registers to refer to distinguishing properties.

In everyday language, a Merkmal is any attribute that helps to identify or describe someone or something, such as height, color, or behavior.

In scientific and scholarly contexts the term has a technical sense as “feature” or “characteristic.” In linguistics, Merkmale are the abstract properties that distinguish elements in a system, for example phonological features like [+voice] or [-nasal], or grammatical features such as number or case. In philosophy, a Merkmal can be a property or predicate attributed to an object.

In biology and medicine, Merkmale refer to observable traits or phenotypic features, such as morphological characteristics or genetic markers used for diagnosis or classification.

In information technology and statistics, Merkmal is the German translation of “feature” or “attribute” of data. Features are the variables used in datasets and models, and der Merkmalraum (feature space) denotes the space of possible features.