charactermeaning

Character meaning is the semantic value associated with a written character within a writing system. It encompasses the relation between form, pronunciation, and meaning, and can be influenced by context and culture. In some scripts, notably logographic ones, a character can carry substantial meaning independent of its pronunciation; in alphabetic scripts, characters primarily encode sounds, with meaning arising through morphemes and words.

In logographic systems like Chinese, many characters derive from semantic components and compound to form words; some characters are phono-semantic compounds where a semantic element hints at meaning and a phonetic element at pronunciation. In syllabaries, characters map to syllables with associated meanings depending on language. In modern use, characters also convey pragmatic information through typography, punctuation, and visual symbolism, including emojis.

In digital text, character meaning is not intrinsic to code points. Unicode encodes characters, while meaning is determined by user knowledge, dictionaries, and context. Processes like character normalization and grapheme segmentation affect interpretation, particularly for combining characters, diacritics, or emoji sequences.

Applications include linguistics research, language teaching, lexicography, and natural language processing, where understanding character meaning helps in word formation, disambiguation, and sentiment analysis.

See also semantics, orthography, logography, morpheme, grapheme, encoding.