characteristic

CEFRB2

/ˌkæɹəktəˈɹɪstɪk/

noun · adjective

Türkçe translations

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In plain English

01
noun
A quality that is typical of a person or thing.
02
adjective
Typical of a particular person, place, or thing.

Examples

Community support of families is characteristic of many societies.
It's characteristic of him to behave like that.

At a glance

Sits at B2 on the CEFR scale

Senses: 5
Parts of speech: 2
Citations: 5
Synonyms: 5

Deep Dive

noun

Extra meanings

A distinguishing feature of a person or thing, a part of mental or physical behavior.
The integer part of a logarithm.

adjective

Extra meaning

Being a distinguishing feature of a person or thing.

More examples

In context

Slow speech is characteristic of that man.
The characteristic of a field, if non-zero, must be a prime number.
1962 [John Wiley & Sons], Nathan Jacobson, Lie Algebras, 1979, Dover, page 289, In this chapter we study the problem of classifying the finite-dimensional simple Lie algebras over an arbitrary field of characteristic 0.

Quick test

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Question 1 · Quick check

A key blank of mammals is that they feed their young with milk.

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Citations

The word in print, with each source given in full.

It is evident, moreover, that as the logarithms of numbers, which are tenfold, the one of the other, do not differ except in their characteristics, it is sufficient that the tables contain the fractional parts only of the logarithms.
1830, Solomon Pearson Miles, Thomas Sherwin, Mathematical Tables: Comprising Logarithms of Numbers, […] , page 69
All this was extraordinarily distasteful to Churchill. It was ugly, gross. Never before had he felt such repulsion when the vicar displayed his characteristic bluntness or coarseness of speech. In the present connexion […] such talk had been distressingly out of place.
1918, W[illiam] B[abington] Maxwell, chapter XII, in The Mirror and the Lamp, Indianapolis, Ind.: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, →OCLC
As the sine and cosine are always proper fractions their logarithms are negative, i.e. have negative characteristics. When we are given an angle, it is impossible to say, from inspection of the angle, what the characteristic of the logarithm of its sine, cosine or tangent may be; so the characteristics have to be printed with the mantissae.
1911, F. T. Swanwick, Elementary Trigonometry, Cambridge University Press, page 60
Similarly, the characteristic for .003 is −3, and the characteristic for .0003 is −4.
1961, “Principles and Applications of Mathematics for Communications-Electronics”, in U.S, Department of the Army, page 69
Traditionally, a complete, discretely valued field of characteristic zero, the maximal ideal of whose valuation ring is generated by the prime number p, has been called a p-adic field. In our terminology, the valuation ring of a p-adic field is a Cohen ring of characteristic zero whose residue field has characteristic p, and consequently a p-adic field is simply the quotient field of such a Cohen ring.
1993, S. Warner, Topological Rings, Elsevier (North-Holland), page 424

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Origin

noun

From Ancient Greek χαρακτηριστικός (kharaktēristikós), from χαρακτηρίζω (kharaktērízō, “to designate by a characteristic mark”), from χαρακτήρ (kharaktḗr, “a mark, character”). By surface analysis, character + -istic.

Deep Dive

noun

adjective

More examples

Related

Quick test

A key blank— of mammals is that they feed their young with milk.

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Origin

noun

A key blank of mammals is that they feed their young with milk.