Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • intransitive verb To burn the surface of; scorch.
  • intransitive verb To reduce to carbon or charcoal by incomplete combustion. synonym: burn.
  • intransitive verb To become scorched.
  • intransitive verb To become reduced to carbon or charcoal.
  • noun A substance that has been scorched, burned, or reduced to charcoal.
  • noun A charwoman.
  • intransitive verb To work as a charwoman.
  • noun Any of several salmonid fishes of the genus Salvelinus, usually having a dark body with light spots, and including the arctic char, the brook trout, and the lake trout.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun An island or sandbank formed in a stream.
  • Ajar.
  • noun Charcoal.
  • noun A turn.
  • noun A particular time.
  • noun A motion; an act.
  • noun A particular thing to do; a single piece of work; a job; in the plural, miscellaneous jobs; work done by the day. See chore.
  • noun A fish of the family Salmonidæ and genus Salvelinus.
  • noun An old wine-measure. In Geneva it was about 145 United States gallons.
  • In building, to hew; work, as stone.
  • noun In sugar manufacturing, concentrated sweet water or liquor highly charged with dissolved sugar.
  • To scorch; burn; ‘singe’ (liquids): as, to char the wort in brewing.
  • To become charcoal.
  • To turn; give another direction to.
  • To lead or drive.
  • To stop or turn back: in this sense only chare.
  • To separate (chaff) from the grain: in this sense only chare.
  • To do; perform; execute.
  • To turn; return.
  • To go; wend.
  • To work in the house of another by the day; do chares or chores; do small jobs.
  • noun A car; a chariot.
  • To burn or reduce to charcoal.
  • To burn the surface of more or less: as, to char the inside of a barrel (a process regularly employed for some purposes); the timbers were badly charred.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun (Zoöl.) One of the several species of fishes of the genus Salvelinus, allied to the spotted trout and salmon, inhabiting deep lakes in mountainous regions in Europe. In the United States, the brook trout (Salvelinus fontinalis) is sometimes called a char.
  • intransitive verb To work by the day, without being a regularly hired servant; to do small jobs.
  • transitive verb To reduce to coal or carbon by exposure to heat; to reduce to charcoal; to burn to a cinder.
  • transitive verb To burn slightly or partially.
  • noun obsolete A car; a chariot.
  • transitive verb obsolete To perform; to do; to finish.
  • transitive verb To work or hew, as stone.
  • noun engraving Work done by the day; a single job, or task; a chore.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun One of the several species of fishes of the genus Salvelinus or the brook trout.
  • noun computing, programming A character (text element such as a letter or symbol), whose data size is commonly one or several bytes.
  • noun obsolete A time; a turn or occasion.
  • noun obsolete A turn of work; a labour or item of business.
  • noun An odd job, a chore or piece of housework.
  • noun A charlady, a woman employed to do housework; cleaning lady.
  • verb obsolete To turn, especially away or aside.
  • verb To work, especially to do housework.
  • verb ergative To burn something to charcoal.
  • verb To burn slightly or superficially so as to affect colour.

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Back-formation from charcoal.]

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Middle English, a piece of work, from Old English cierr, a turning.]

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Origin unknown.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

Origin unknown, perhaps from Celtic.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

Abbreviation of character.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From Middle English cherre ("odd job"), from Old English ċierr ("a turn, change, time, occasion, affair, business"), from ċierran ("to turn, change, turn oneself, go, come, proceed, turn back, return, regard, translate, persuade, convert, be converted, agree to, submit, make to submit, reduce"), from Proto-Germanic *karzijanan (“to turn”), from Proto-Indo-European *gers- (“to bend, turn”). Cognate with Dutch keer ("a time, turn, occasion"), German Kehre ("a turn, bight, bend"), Greek γύρος ("a bout, whirl"), gyre. Compare Sanskrit "char" (to do), "kri" (to do), "kar" (to perform), and Persian کار (kar, work). More at chore, ajar.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

Back-formation from charcoal.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From Mandarin chah or cha, with intrusive r.

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Examples

  • I get an error saying "invalid conversion from 'const char' to 'const char*'; initializing argument 2 of ` char* strcpy (char*, const char*) '" ...

    DaniWeb IT Discussion Community pearle 2010

  • CarbonCore 0x97ad636c FSMount:: makepath (unsigned long, char const*, unsigned long, char*) + 140 2

    Discussions: Message List - root 2010

  • CarbonCore 0x97ad2621 FSMount:: _getattrs (unsigned long, char const*, unsigned long, unsigned long, FSAttributeInfo*, unsigned long, unsigned char*) + 179 3

    Discussions: Message List - root 2010

  • I get an error saying "invalid conversion from 'const char' to 'const char*'; initializing argument 2 of ` char* strcpy (char*, const char*) '" ...

    DaniWeb IT Discussion Community pearle 2010

  • CarbonCore 0x97ad2621 FSMount:: _getattrs (unsigned long, char const*, unsigned long, unsigned long, FSAttributeInfo*, unsigned long, unsigned char*) + 179 3

    Discussions: Message List - root 2010

  • CarbonCore 0x97ad636c FSMount:: makepath (unsigned long, char const*, unsigned long, char*) + 140 2

    Discussions: Message List - root 2010

  • You can check where char is used with this command: grep - E "char\* | char" * .c *.

    KDE UserBase - Recent changes [en] 2009

  • Charnumber (char) msgbox % char%; There is a problem here.

    AutoHotkey Community 2009

  • This really annoyed me a while ago while I was studying C++ (from a book), why do you magically create a string INSTEAD of a pointer to a single char by using char*?

    LinuxQuestions.org 2009

  • #include unsigned long myint = 1234567890; int main (int argc, char**argv) int i = 0; unsigned char * cptr = (unsigned char*)

    DaniWeb IT Discussion Community kendaop 2010

Comments

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  • See charnel for more information, which I'm too lazy to paste here. ;-)

    November 11, 2007

  • Also tea as in 'a nice cup of char'.

    February 6, 2008

  • That would be a cup of cha to me. Put the kettle on dear, I'm parched.

    February 6, 2008

  • If the county made a habit of shaking hands with chars, however could one know whom not to know? - ''Yashima, or, The Gorgeous West'' by R T Sherwood, 1931.

    December 24, 2008

  • Another usage on grilse.

    January 23, 2009