Definition of "char"

When thou hast done this chare, I’ll give thee leave to play till doomsday.

c. 1606–1607, William Shakespeare, “The Tragedie of Anthonie and Cleopatra”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount, published 1623, [Act V, scene ii]

But there was nobody at Kig and Kadgit's except the charwoman wiping over the “lino” in the passage. “Nobody here yet, Miss,” said the char.

1919, Katherine Mansfield [pseudonym; Kathleen Mansfield Murry], “Pictures”, in Bliss and Other Stories, London: Constable & Company, published 1920, page 163

She explained that she was the commissionaire's wife, who did the charing, and I gave her the order for the coffee.

1893, Arthur Conan Doyle, The Naval Treaty, Norton, published 2005, page 677

Her husband had been a soldier, and from a grateful country she received a pension large enough to keep her from starvation, and by charring and doing such odd jobs as she could get she earned a little extra to supply herself with liquor.

1897, W. Somerset Maugham, Lisa of Lambeth, chapter 2

All's chared when he is gone.

1613–1614, William Shakespeare, John Fletcher, “The Two Noble Kinsmen.”, in Comedies and Tragedies […], London: […] Humphrey Robinson, […], and for Humphrey Moseley […], published 1679, Act III, scene ii

The unit is an 80-column, 30 char. /sec dot matrix printer which uses a 5 by 7 font.

1975 April 23, Computerworld, page 21

Chars can be considered as integers if need be without an explicit cast.

1997, Cay S Horstmann, Gary Cornell, Core Java 1.1: Fundamentals

Then since each char occupies one byte, these four bytes represent the three letters 'B', 'y', 'e', and the null character NUL.

1998, John R Hubbard, Schaum's Outline of Theory and Problems of Fundamentals of Computing with C++

When a 32-bit int value is stored to a 16-bit char variable, information can be lost if the 16 most significant bits are not zeroes in the int value.

2004, Kari Laitinen, A Natural Introduction to Computer Programming with C#

Thus string variables are pointer variables to chars.

2000, Ken Brownsey, The essence of data structures using C++

.NET uses the Unicode character set in which each char constant or variable takes up two bytes (16 bits) of storage.

2002, Nell B. Dale, Michael McMillan, Visual Basic .NET: a laboratory course - Page 25