Character (symbol)

The word "character" was used in the sense of letter or grapheme by William Caxton, referring to the Phoenician alphabet: "The Fenyces were the fyrst inuentours of caracteris dyfferencing that one fro that other, of whiche were fourmed lettres for to write".

John Dee (1527 – 1608), a mathematician and occultist, designed an esoteric symbol (right), which he described in his 1564 book, Monas Hieroglyphica: the word hieroglyph is a composite of hiero (holy) and glyph (a distinct character).

In the 19th century, this sense of the word appears mainly in Romantic poetry, such as Sir Walter Scott's Lay of the last minstrel (1805), where "A hallow'd taper shed a glimmering light / On mystic implements of magic might; On cross, and character, and talisman," (6.17).

From the esoteric or mystical meanings, learned authors of the Early Modern period abstracted a notion of Character as a code or hierarchical system that embodied all knowledge or all of reality, or a written representation of a philosophical language that would recover the "true names" lost in the confusion of tongues.

For example, the Unicode standard maps the same letters from Latin, Greek, and Hebrew alphabets to various duplicate code points in the Letterlike Symbols and other blocks, often meant to represent specific mathematical or scientific uses for that glyph.