caractere

Caractere is a term used in several languages to refer to the basic unit of written language that represents a sign in a script. It can denote a letter, a digit, punctuation, a symbol, or any other sign that can appear in text. In linguistics and typography, a caractere is often discussed as an abstract code point that a font renders as a visible glyph, and it is sometimes contrasted with the grapheme, the smallest unit of writing that carries meaning or sound.

In computing, a caractere is typically understood as the abstract entity stored or transmitted by a computer in a character encoding. The most common modern encoding systems are Unicode, which assigns a unique code point to each character across languages, and legacy encodings such as ASCII. A single visible glyph may correspond to multiple code points in some cases, while a single code point can have multiple glyph representations depending on font, size, or typographic context. Unicode also supports combining marks, allowing complex characters to be formed from multiple code points.

The concept of a caractere covers a wide range of writing systems and typographic practices. In everyday use, it includes letters, digits, punctuation, symbols, and control codes used by software. The term is written with diacritical marks in many related languages (for example, caractère in French or carácter in Spanish), highlighting how the idea crosses linguistic boundaries. Related topics include character encoding, typography, and graphemes.

Note: The exact spelling and diacritics of the equivalent term vary by language, but the underlying idea remains the same: a unit that represents a sign in a writing system.