subcharacter

plural subcharacters

1. A lesser or secondary character in fiction.

   The characters, the subcharacters, the mature but tragic love story, all appealed to me. And the technique of telling the stories with a narrator who would function like a Greek chorus occurred to me in what I thought was a brilliant flash.

   2007, R. Barton Palmer, Twentieth-Century American Fiction on Screen, page 65

2. Any of the components making up a complex text character.

   However, as discussed by Melton, a Chinese character is an ideograph which frequently contains two or more parts called subcharacters. The subcharacters are commonly called radicals in Chinese lexicography.

   1990, Allen Kent, James G. Williams, Encyclopedia of Microcomputers, volume 6

1. not comparableOf less than one text character.