A character is a semiotic sign or symbol, or a glyph typically a letter, a numerical digit, an ideogram, a hieroglyph, a punctuation mark or another typographic mark. History The Ancient Greek word ('charaktēr') is an agent noun of the verb (charassō) with a meaning "to sharpen, to whet", and also "to make cake", from a PIE root "cut" also continued in Irish gearr and English gash, which is perhaps an early loan ultimately from the same Greek root. A is thus an "engraver", originally in the sense of a craftsman, but then also used for a tool used for engraving, and for a stamp for minting coins. From the stamp, the meaning was extended to the stamp impression, Plato using the noun in the sense of "engraved mark". In Plutarch, the word could refer to a figure or letter, Lucian uses it of hieroglyphs as opposed to Greek grammata (Herm. 44) Metaphorically, it could refer to a distinctive mark, Herodotus (1.57) using it of a particular dialect, or (1.116) of a characteristic mark of an individual. The collective noun "characteristics" appears later, in Dionysius Halicarnassensis. Via Latin , Old French , the word passed into Middle English as in the 14th century. Wycliffe (1382) has "To a [...] in her " () for the mark of the beast (translating "imprinted or branded mark"). Graphemes, glyphs and hieroglyphs The word "character" was used in the sense of letter or grapheme by William Caxton, referring to the Phoenician alphabet: (Eneydos 6.25). As in Greek, the word was used especially for foreign or mysterious graphemes (such as Chinese, Syriac, or Runic ones) as opposed to the familiar letters; in particular of shorthand (in David Copperfield (chapter 38) sarcastically of shorthand, "a procession of new horrors, called arbitrary characters; the most despotic characters I have ever known"), and since 1949 in computing (see character (computing)). As a collective noun, the word can refer to writing or printing in general (Shakespeare's sonnet nr. 59: , meaning "since thought was first put into writing"). The word hieroglyph (Greek for sacred writing) dates from an early use in an English to Italian dictionary published by John Florio in 1598, referencing the complex and mysterious characters of the Egyptian alphabet. Egyptian hieroglyphs were the formal writing system used in Ancient Egypt. Hieroglyphs combined logographic, syllabic and alphabetic elements, with a total of some 1,000 distinct characters. Esotericism