Character or Characters may refer to:

Arts, entertainment, and media

Literature

* ''Character'' (novel), a 1936 Dutch novel by Ferdinand Bordewijk * ''Characters'' (Theophrastus), a classical Greek set of character sketches attributed to Theophrastus

Music

* ''Characters'' (John Abercrombie album), 1977 * ''Character'' (Dark Tranquillity album), 2005 * ''Character'' (Julia Kent album), 2013 * ''Character'' (Rachael Sage album), 2020 * ''Characters'' (Stevie Wonder album), 1987

Types of entity

Character (arts) In fiction, a character (or speaker, in poetry) is a person or other being in a narrative (such as a novel, play, radio or television series, music, film, or video game). The character may be entirely fictional or based on a real-life person, i ...

, an agent within a work of art, including literature, drama, cinema, opera, etc. *

Character sketch In literature, a character sketch, or character, is a rough-and-ready rendering and thumbnail portrayal of an individual, capturing, in brief, that person's physical characteristics, psychological attributes, and the like. The brief descriptions ...

or character, a literary description of a character type *

Game character (disambiguation) A game character is a person or any other entity acting in a game. Game character may also refer to: * Player character, a character or a role in tabletop and video games, who is controlled by a player, typically a protagonist of the game's plot ...

, various types of characters in a video game or role playing game **

Player character A player character (also known as a playable character or PC) is a fictional character in a video game or tabletop role-playing game whose actions are controlled by a player rather than the rules of the game. The characters that are not control ...

, as above but who is controlled or whose actions are directly chosen by a player **

Non-player character A non-player character (NPC), or non-playable character, is any character in a game that is not controlled by a player. The term originated in traditional tabletop role-playing games where it applies to characters controlled by the gamemaster o ...

, as above but not player-controlled, frequently abbreviated as NPC

Other uses in arts, entertainment, and media

* ''Character'' (film), a 1997 Dutch film based on Bordewijk's novel * ''

Charaktery ''Charaktery'' (, ''Personalities'') is a monthly magazine published in Poland and covering psychology-related topics, such as relationships, mental health, the functioning of the brain, neuropsychology, emotions, overcoming addictions, depressio ...

'', a monthly magazine in Poland * '' Netflix Presents: The Characters'', an improvised sketch comedy show on Netflix

Sciences

Character (biology) A phenotypic trait, simply trait, or character state is a distinct variant of a phenotypic characteristic of an organism; it may be either inherited or determined environmentally, but typically occurs as a combination of the two.Lawrence, Elean ...

, the abstraction of an observable physical or biochemical trait of an organism

Mathematics

Character (mathematics) In mathematics, a character is (most commonly) a special kind of function from a group to a field (such as the complex numbers). There are at least two distinct, but overlapping meanings. Other uses of the word "character" are almost always qualifie ...

, a homomorphism from a group to a field *

Characterization (mathematics) In mathematics, a characterization of an object is a set of conditions that, while different from the definition of the object, is logically equivalent to it. To say that "Property ''P'' characterizes object ''X''" is to say that not only does ''X ...

, the logical equivalency between objects of two different domains. *

Character theory In mathematics, more specifically in group theory, the character of a group representation is a function on the group that associates to each group element the trace of the corresponding matrix. The character carries the essential information about ...

, the mathematical theory of special kinds of characters associated to group representations * Dirichlet character, a type of character in number theory * Multiplicative character, a homomorphism from a group to the multiplicative subgroup of a field

Morality and social science

* Character education, a US term for values education * Character structure, a person's traits * Moral character, an evaluation of a particular individual's durable moral qualities

Symbols

* Character (symbol), a sign or symbol ** Character (computing), a unit of information roughly corresponding to a grapheme ** Chinese characters, a written language symbol (sinogram) used in Chinese, Japanese, and other languages

Other uses

* Character (income tax), a type of income for tax purposes in the US * Sacramental character, a Catholic teaching * Neighbourhood character, the look and feel of a built environment