characteristic

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Definitions (29)

Toggle American Heritage definitions American Heritage Dictionary (4)

  1. adjective Being a feature that helps to distinguish a person or thing; distinctive: heard my friend's characteristic laugh; the stripes that are characteristic of the zebra.
  2. noun A feature that helps to identify, tell apart, or describe recognizably; a distinguishing mark or trait.
  3. noun Mathematics The integral part of a logarithm as distinguished from the mantissa: The characteristic of the logarithm 6.3214 is 6.
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Examples (50)

  • Another characteristic was her pity for the obscure, the dull and the poor. —  Margot Asquith, An Autobiography
  • It is interesting to notice that the characteristic which has been traditionally supposed to render gold especially suitable for use as the standard of value, namely, its inelasticity of supply, turns out to be precisely the characteristic which is at the bottom of the trouble Our conclusion can be stated in the most general form (taking the propensity to consume as given) as follows. —  The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money: Project Gutenberg Australia
  • Yet their characteristic is acidity of temper and boundless licence of querulous or insulting talk. —  THE PRIVATE LIFE OF HENRY MAITLAND
  • This characteristic is arguably true of all markets, of course, and it is one of the reasons that bubbles develop. —  pfblogs.org: The Ad-Free Personal Finance Blogs Aggregator
  • This characteristic is also used in the Tudor houses. —  MyLinkVault Newest Links
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Roget's II Roget's II: The New Thesaurus

Allen's Allen's Synonyms and Antonyms

Used in the same context Used in the Same Context

quality ·  feature ·  development ·  interest ·  knowledge ·  many ·  level ·  property

Used in the same contextWord Family

characteristic:   characteristics
Roget's II: The New Thesaurus, Third Edition by the Editors of the American Heritage® Dictionary. Copyright © 2003, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

Etymologies (1)

Toggle Century etymologies Century Dictionary (1)

  1. = French caractéristique = Spanish caracteristico = Portuguese caracteristico= Italian caratteristico = Dutch karakteristiek = Swedish karakteristik (cf. German karakteristisch = Danish karakteristisk), from Greek χαρακτηριστικός from χαρακτηρίζειν, designate, characterize: see characterize.
 

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/kæræktəˈrɪstɪk/
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