caractère

Caractère is a French noun with several related but distinct meanings centered on distinguishing features, symbols, or signs. The most common sense in everyday speech is personality: it designates the set of stable traits that define a person’s temperament or disposition. Phrases such as avoir du caractère (to have character) or un caractère difficile (a difficult character) reflect judgments about temperament and behavior.

In the realm of writing and typography, a caractère is a single unit of written text: a letter, digit, punctuation mark, or other glyph. The plural is caractères. The term is used for both the abstract idea of a character and its visual form in a particular font. Common expressions include un caractère spécial (a special character) or un caractère accentué (an accented character).

In computing and information technology, caractère denotes a code point in a character encoding system, such as ASCII or Unicode. Text handling involves counting, typing, and rendering characters; issues include character sets, encoding, and normalization.

Overlapping senses exist in cultural and literary contexts, where character can refer to the moral quality or nature of an action or a place, and to the overall character or atmosphere of a work of art.