character

In genetics, a character is a heritable feature of an organism that can take different forms, such as flower colour, seed shape, or eye colour. It names the category of feature being studied; the particular forms it can take are its variants. Flower colour is a character; purple and white are two of its possible states.

The distinction between a character and its states is the foundation of classical genetics. Mendel chose pea plant characters that came in clearly different forms, such as round versus wrinkled seeds, and tracked how those alternative forms moved from parents to offspring across generations.

Because each contrasting form of a character is usually tied to a different allele of a gene, studying characters lets geneticists infer the genes behind them without ever seeing the DNA. The visible alternatives serve as readable signposts pointing to the hidden alleles that produce them.

In everyday usage “character” and “trait” are often interchanged, and many writers treat them as synonyms. Where authors do distinguish them, “character” tends to mean the general feature, such as height, while a “trait” or character state means a specific form of it, such as being tall.