characteristic

1. 1.

   typical or distinctive

   “heard my friend's characteristic laugh”

   “red and gold are the characteristic colors of autumn”

   “stripes characteristic of the zebra”

   Antonymsuncharacteristic

   Similardiagnosticdistinctivepeculiar

Other forms of characteristic

plural

characteristics·

Forms marked · are formed by the regular rule rather than recorded in the source data. English keeps a few hundred irregulars and the rest follow the pattern, so the rule is right far more often than not — but it is a rule, and the mark says so.

Questions about characteristic

What does characteristic mean?

characteristic means "a prominent attribute or aspect of something". That is the primary sense; the word has 5 in total, listed in full on this page.

How many syllables are in characteristic?

characteristic has 5 syllables: char-ac-te-ris-tic. The stress falls on "ris". In IPA it is /ˌkɛɹəktɚˈɪstɪk/.

What is another word for characteristic?

Close synonyms include feature, device characteristic. Each sense on this page lists its own synonyms, because a word with several meanings rarely has one substitute that works for all of them.

What is the opposite of characteristic?

The recorded antonyms are uncharacteristic.

Is characteristic a common word?

characteristic is banded "Familiar" — widely understood, used when the subject calls for it. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.

What rhymes with characteristic?

8 words rhyme with characteristic. Rhymes are matched on the phonemes from the last stressed vowel onward, which is the definition a reader has in their head.