Subcharacter

noun

noun ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    A lesser or secondary character in fiction.

    "The characters, the subcharacters, the mature but tragic love story, all appealed to me. And the technique of telling the stories with a narrator who would function like a Greek chorus occurred to me in what I thought was a brilliant flash."

  2. 2
    Any of the components making up a complex text character.

    "However, as discussed by Melton, a Chinese character is an ideograph which frequently contains two or more parts called subcharacters. The subcharacters are commonly called radicals in Chinese lexicography."

Example

More examples

"The characters, the subcharacters, the mature but tragic love story, all appealed to me. And the technique of telling the stories with a narrator who would function like a Greek chorus occurred to me in what I thought was a brilliant flash."

Etymology

From sub- + character.

Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.