Characteristic
/ˌkærəktəˈrɪstɪk/adjective, noun
Marking something out as distinctly itself; in mathematics, the whole-number part of a common logarithm.
The Greek roots
Literally: “of the engraved mark”
The story of the word
χαρακτήρ was the punch a mint used to strike coins, then the mark it left, then any distinguishing stamp, so the leap from tooling to personality happened in Greek and arrived in English intact. Mathematics uses the noun in two unrelated ways: the integer part of a common logarithm, paired with the mantissa, and the characteristic of a ring, the number of times you add one to reach zero. Under all of it sits χαράσσω, to scratch.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → French → English
- First recorded
- 17th century
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
In a sentence
Working by hand meant looking the mantissa up in a table and writing the characteristic yourself.