karakterit

Karakterit is the Finnish plural noun form of karakteri, used to refer to multiple instances of a character or symbol. The term spans several senses: it can denote a symbol or glyph used in writing or typography, a character in a narrative or media work, and, less commonly in everyday speech, aspects of a person’s character or temperament. In ordinary Finnish, more specific terms are often used for particular senses—kirjaimet for letters of the alphabet and merkit for symbols—while karakterit appears in technical, linguistic, or borrowed phrases.

The word derives from the Latin character, entering Finnish through language contact with Swedish and other European languages. The form karakteri has been adapted to Finnish spelling, with karakterit forming the standard plural.

In computing and typography, karakterit refers to individual symbols in a font or text stream, such as Unicode characters. Character encodings define how each karakter is represented as a sequence of bits. In literary or media contexts, karakterit can refer to personages, though Finnish often uses words like hahmo or henkilöhahmo to express “a character in a story.” When discussing personality or ethics, Finnish typically uses luonne or persoonallisuus rather than karakteri, though the word may appear in more general or borrowed phrasing.

See also Unicode, character encoding, ASCII, and typographic terminology.