Word.ws English Dictionary

character piece

character piece noun: a musical composition that expresses a specific mood or non-musical idea.

Noun

character piece (plural character pieces)

  1. A musical composition that expresses a specific mood or non-musical idea.
    • That does not mean that all character pieces of this period present moods expressly, only that the musical term 'character' is not always telling for character pieces, to put it crudely.2016, Erik Wallrup, Being Musically Attuned: The Act of Listening to Music, page 36
  2. A work of art (painting, sculpture, writing, film, etc.) that has as its subject matter the description or depiction of an individual person or character.
    • In spite of it being a character piece, I really loved how the rocks and dirt were brought to life.2005, Stephen Stahlberg, Pascal Blanche, Daniel Wade, Character Modeling, page 60
    • Wilde was impressed by Beerbohm's critical, yet laudatory character piece on him in the Anglo-American Times of March 25, 1893, entitled 'OW by [Max Beerbohm masquerading as] an American'.2007, A. Kingston, Oscar Wilde as a Character in Victorian Fiction, page 115

Forms of character piece

pluralcharacter pieces

Origin of character piece

Calque of German Charakterstück.

Questions about character piece

What does character piece mean?
Character piece means a musical composition that expresses a specific mood or non-musical idea.
What part of speech is character piece?
Character piece is a noun.
What is the plural of character piece?
The plural of character piece is character pieces.

Words near character piece in the dictionary

  1. character men
  2. character neuroses
  3. character neurosis
  4. character part
  5. character parts
  6. character piece
  7. character pieces
  8. character reference
  9. character references
  10. character set
  11. character sets

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: character piece (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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