| The American Heritage® Book of English Usage. |
A Practical and Authoritative Guide to Contemporary English. 1996.
|
4. Science Terms: Distinctions, Restrictions, and Confusions
|
| § 17. characteristic / trait |
| You are going to the first hockey game of the season with someone you have never met. You have agreed upon a time and a place to meet and you have described what you look like—tall with curly hair, wire-rimmed glasses, and, in honor of the occasion, a Rangers jersey. What you have given your hockey chum is a list of your characteristics. A characteristic is a feature or quality that helps identify, tell apart, or describe recognizably a person or a group of people. The various features or qualities that qualify as characteristics can roughly be divided into two groups: acquired and inherited. Wire-rimmed glasses and a Rangers jersey represent acquired characteristics, while height and type of hair are inherited characteristics. Such inherited characteristics are technically referred to as traits, a term derived from Latin tractus, “drawing out, line.” In nontechnical usage, characteristic is often the term of choice, but in technical applications, trait is the preferred term to use when describing a genetically determined condition or feature. | 1 |
|
|
|
| The American Heritage® Book of English Usage. Copyright © 1996 by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. |
|
|
