Caracter

Spanish words that look similar to English ones can often be the hardest ones to master. Their apparent familiarity stops us from noticing their true nature. Carácter is one such (mostly) 'false friend'. Its meaning is close to that of English character but different enough to be worthy of comment here. But first, let's talk about característica.

Característica

If someone asked you about the characteristics of a good software program, you might respond by mentioning its qualities: that it is easy to use or that it doesn't crash often. In Spanish, the question is more specifically about what we call features in English.

• ¿Qué características tiene? What features does it have? For example: Can it display PDF documents?

The expression contar con also seems to pop up when promoting features: Cuenta con un editor de texto. It comes with a text editor (i.e., has a text-editing feature).

Característica is also used for talking about personal features or traits.

• Una característica común que tienen las pandillas de motociclistas: tatuajes. A physical feature that biker gangs have in common: tatoos.

Carácter fuerte

The main use of carácter I hear in Spanish is for talking about temperament, that facet of personality concerned with aggreeableness. It is common to describe a person who is grumpy by nature as having a carácter fuerte or a mal carácter. Here are some examples to help you get the idea:

• Tiene un carácter fuerte. He's easily angered. He's a hothead.
• De plano de es carácter más difícil que el tuyo. He's even more difficult than you.
• ¡Qué carácter! How aggressive!
• Porque tiene su carácter. Because she's a bitch.
• Es de carácter agradable. She has a nice, pleasant personality. Easy to get along with.

From these examples, you can see that when we talk about someone's carácter, we have in mind some kind of inborn, and presumably inalterable, personality trait. For this reason, carácter wouldn't be the word to use when the nastiness is portrayed as a one-time, out-of-character incident.

Values and Nature

So if saying that someone es de mal carácter is a statement about their personality, then how do we say that someone has a bad character? To speak about someone's character in the sense of moral values, use the word valores. Es de buenos valores. He's a man of character. Or simply: Es muy buena persona or Es una persona muy decente.

Closely related is another use of 'character' in English: the nature of something. To express 'the character of the research', use a word like naturaleza, nature.

In neither of these cases would carácter be a good fit.

Personaje

Don't forget that characters in a play/movie/book are called personajes. The main character is el/la protagonista, a word less formal its English counterpart.

Letter

The word carácter also works for 'character' in the sense of a typed or printed letter or the digital representation of such. Un carácter no númerico, a non-numeric character. Finally, a case where character and carácter coincide.

Carácter, caracteres

Note that Spanish carácter is accented on its second syllable, not its first. Oddly enough, the accent shifts to the following syllable when forming the plural: dos caracteres.