Character has a fair few meanings without any obvious relation between them. What’s the first one you think of? For me, it’s a (usually) fictional person in a movie, show or novel, or some other form of story, as in “Harry Potter is a character within the famous novel ‘A Game of Thrones’ by J. R. R. Tolkien.” This is a person we can project ourselves onto, and come to understand as if they were a flesh-and-blood person, by immersing ourselves in the world surrounding that character. Here’s an example from the 16th century:

“The chief character or Hero in a Tragedy..ought in prudence to be such a man, who has so much more in him of Virtue than of Vice” (OED)

This sense, while it goes back a fair way, isn’t the oldest sense, nor the original meaning. A carecter, in 14th century English, meant a “symbol marked or branded on the body”, or – even more fun – “symbol or drawing used in sorcery,” (etymonline). It comes from the Greek kharakter, meaning an “engraved mark”, from the kharax, a “pointed stake”, which was presumably used to make that mark. The sense of a religious, mystical or occult symbol is found in the OED quote below:

“He weares Paracelsian Characters for the tooth-ache.”

Paracelsian probably refers to Paracelsus who, besides being one of the movers-and-shakers of 16th century medicine, was into his occult. So we can deduce that a “Paracelsian Character” was probably made up of one part snake oil, two parts hocus-pocus. I’ll spare you and myself the research-rabbit hole that would answer the question of “Why was Paracelsus into the occult,” but suffice it to say that, a character could be a much more mystical thing than (even) Harry Potter.

But it’s the sense of “symbol marked or branded” that really stuck out, and is why we have several meanings of character related to printing, typing or writing, as in “a symbol used to represent an element of language,” as in the Latin alphabet, the Arabic abjad, the Korean syllabary, and the Japanese FUBAR that is kanji. This sense dates at least as far back as 1490, thanks to William Caxton, who, besides being one of the movers-and-shakers of 15th century printing – well, no, that’s exactly what he was famous for. He brought over Gutenberg’s printing press to England, allowing us to spread language by the form of the written word; which both improved literacy, and paved the way for a standardised English (read: English-that-is-slightly-less-of-a-clusterfuck.) Caxton said:

“The Fenyces were the fyrst Inuentours of carecteris [Fr. carrecteres] dyfferencyng that one fro that other, of whiche were fourmed lettres for to write.” (1490, OED)

The Fenyces means the Phoenicians, as he was writing about the Phoenician alphabet – the ancestor of most of the major writing systems around the world, including the Arabic, Latin, Greek, Cyrillic and Aramaic alphabets. So they were indeed the first inuentours of the character as we know it today – or at least, the first which we have in recorded history.

But how did we get from the written word to the literary legends? The development probably has a lot to do with metaphor. From the sense of a written character, the meaning was extended to mean “The defining quality, or the set of mental and moral qualities that set apart a person or people”, as in:

“…his character. He is of an ingenious and free spirit, eager and constant in reproofe.” (1600, OED)

It also meant a single distinguishing feature of a person or a thing, which survives today in the noun characteristic. So a character by this point is a set of qualities that define a person. It seems like a natural extension, that this developed into a literary character, who is a sum of all the qualities which bring them to life from the text. The literary character, in other words, is a metaphor for those characteristics he, she or it represents. And those characteristics trace right back to the very characters used to create them: the printed letters on the page.

Note: I didn’t publish an entry on Thursday, so I’ve published two entries on Friday (although it is now Saturday.) The intention is to publish five posts a week, although this may become less feasible as university starts up again.