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Learn How to Pronounce characters | YouPronounce.it

How to Pronounce characters

Quick Answer: In English, the word characters is pronounced /ˈkærəktərz/.
(Listen to the audio below for the stress and intonation)

Meaning and Context

In literature, film, theater, and other narrative arts, characters are the fictional persons, beings, or entities who drive the plot and with whom audiences form empathetic connections. Their development—through dialogue, action, and motivation—is central to storytelling, with distinctions often made between protagonists, antagonists, and supporting characters. Beyond the realm of fiction, the term holds a fundamental meaning in computing and typography, where characters are the individual letters, numbers, punctuation marks, and symbols that constitute a writing system or a digital character encoding standard like ASCII or Unicode. This dual significance underscores the term's pervasive role in both human expression and digital communication, making character development, character arcs, and character encoding essential concepts for writers, filmmakers, and software developers alike.

Common Mistakes and Alternative Spellings

The primary spelling is "characters," with the plural formed by adding an "s." Common misspellings and typos often arise from phonetic confusion or haste. Frequent errors include "charachters" (adding an extra "a"), "charcters" (omitting the first "a"), and "caracters" (omitting the "h"). In informal digital communication, truncations like "chars" are sometimes used, particularly in programming contexts as shorthand for "characters." It is also worth noting the potential for confusion with the homophone "character's" (the possessive form) and "characters'" (the plural possessive), where the incorrect omission or placement of the apostrophe constitutes a common grammatical error rather than a spelling mistake.

Example Sentences

The novel's enduring appeal lies in its richly drawn characters, whose flawed humanity and complex motivations resonate across generations.

When designing a new font, the typographer must ensure that every character, from the ampersand to the numeral, maintains visual consistency.

A fundamental task in data validation is to limit the number of characters a user can input into a form field.

Her performance transformed what could have been a one-dimensional villain into a tragically sympathetic character.

The programmer debugged the script by checking for non-ASCII characters that were corrupting the text file.

Related Pronunciations



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