Char
Origin 1
From Middle English cherre ("odd job"), from Old English Ä‹ierr ("a turn, change, time, occasion, affair, business"), from Ä‹ierran ("to turn, change, turn oneself, go, come, proceed, turn back, return, regard, translate, persuade, convert, be converted, agree to, submit, make to submit, reduce"), from Proto-Germanic *karzijanÄ… ("to turn"), from Proto-Indo-European *gers- ("to bend, turn"). Cognate with Dutch keer ("a time, turn, occasion"), German Kehre ("a turn, bight, bend"), Greek γÏÏος ("a bout, whirl"), gyre. Compare Sanskrit "char" (to do), "kri" (to do), "kar" (to perform), and Persian کار (kar, "work"). More at chore, ajar.
Alternative forms
Verb
- (obsolete) To turn, especially away or aside.
- To work, especially to do housework; to work by the day, without being a regularly hired servant.
- 1893, She explained that she was the commissionaire's wife, who did the charing, and I gave her the order for the coffee. — Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘The Naval Treaty’ (Norton 2005, p.677)
- 1897, W. Somerset Maugham, , chapter 2Her husband had been a soldier, and from a grateful country she received a pension large enough to keep her from starvation, and by charring and doing such odd jobs as she could get she earned a little extra to supply herself with liquor.
- (obsolete) To perform; to do; to finish.
- Old proverbThat char is chared, as the good wife said when she had hanged her husband.
- To work or hew (stone, etc.).
Origin 2
Origin unknown, perhaps from Celtic.
Alternative forms
Noun
- One of the several species of fishes of the genus Salvelinus.“Among other native delicacies, they give you fresh char.â€
Origin 3
Back-formation from {{3}}
Verb
- (ergative) To burn something to charcoal.
- To burn slightly or superficially so as to affect colour.
Synonyms
Pronunciation
Origin 4
Abbreviation of character.
Noun
char
(plural chars)- (computing, programming) A character (text element such as a letter or symbol), whose data size is commonly one or several bytes.
- Java programming language tutorial http://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/i18n/text/terminology.html
- 1975, Computerworld - 23 avr. 1975 - Page 21The unit is an 80-column, 30 char. /sec dot matrix printer which uses a 5 by 7 font.A Unicode code unit is a 16-bit char value. For example, imagine a String that contains the letters "abc" followed by the Deseret LONG I, which is represented with two char values. That string contains four characters, four code points, but five code units.
- 1997, Cay S Horstmann, Gary Cornell, Core Java 1.1: FundamentalsChars can be considered as integers if need be without an explicit cast.
- 1998, John R Hubbard, Schaum's Outline of Theory and Problems of Fundamentals of Computing with C++Then since each char occupies one byte, these four bytes represent the three letters 'B', 'y', 'e', and the null character NUL.
- 2000, Ken Brownsey, The essence of data structures using C++Thus string variables are pointer variables to chars.
- 2002, Nell B. Dale, Michael McMillan, Visual Basic .NET: a laboratory course - Page 25.NET uses the Unicode character set in which each char constant or variable takes up two bytes (16 bits) of storage.
Derived terms
Origin 5
From Mandarin 茶, with intrusive r.