Personality & Character

The discovery of a word’s origin, leaving aside the steps over the centuries which have led to the way it’s used today, can give us an interesting perspective on current usage (see last month’s post on “Ambition” and “Passionate”).

I’m sometimes asked what the difference is between “personality” and “character”. In ordinary speech the words are often used interchangeably but a look at their origins can help us understand and appreciate the difference.

Personality. The Latin origin of our word Personality is the “persona” (derived from an earlier Greek word meaning “face”) which was the painted mask worn by actors taking part in Greek and Roman tragedy and comedy on stage. Like the masks still worn in some Asian theatre, it vividly defined for the audience the part the actor was playing; very helpful, too, given the distances vision and sound had to travel to reach some of the audience in the larger theatres. There is a link here to “resonance”, as the wooden masks also acted as soundboxes which magnified the sound of the actors’ voices.

So personality is outward-looking, the set of attitudes and behaviours which are uniquely ours and which define how we appear to other people. Like the actor’s mask, personality can change.

Character. Character is derived from a classical Greek word which means “to cut deeply or to engrave”. To the Greeks a character was “a mark, an engraving or a distinctive quality”. So character describes our inwardly-held moral values and beliefs, distinguishing marks deeply engraved in our identity, which stand behind but are sometimes in conflict with our personality.