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characteristic


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Definition of characteristic

adjective

  • typical of a particular person, place, or thing:he began with a characteristic attack on extremism

noun

  • 1a feature or quality belonging typically to a person, place, or thing and serving to identify them:certain defining characteristics of the school emerge from the study
  • 2 Mathematics the whole number or integral part of a logarithm, which gives the order of magnitude of the original number.

Derivatives

characteristically

adverb

Origin:

mid 17th century: from French caractéristique or medieval Latin characteristicus, from Greek kharaktēristikos, from kharaktēr 'a stamping tool'

characteristic in other Oxford dictionaries

Definition of characteristic in the US English dictionary