char

, charr

any of various troutlike fishes of the genus Salvelinus, esp S. alpinus, occurring in cold lakes and northern seas: family Salmonidae (salmon)

Collins Discovery Encyclopedia, 1st edition © HarperCollins Publishers 2005

char

(programming)

/keir/ or /char/; rarely, /kar/ character. Especially used by C programmers, as "char" is C's typename for character data.

This article is provided by FOLDOC - Free Online Dictionary of Computing (foldoc.org)

The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.

Char

(Salvelinus), a genus of fish of the family Salmonidae, with two species: the Alpine char (S. alpinus) and S. leucomaenis. (According to some sources, there are four species.)

In lakes, chars develop habitat types, which are considered subspecies by some taxonomists and species by others. The char is found along the shores of Europe and northern Asia. Its body length is 35–65 cm (rarely, up to 88 cm), and its weight is 1–3 kg (sometimes up to 15 kg). A migratory fish, the char enters rivers for spawning from June to September and spawns in October-November of the sixth to seventh year of its life. The young go out to sea when they are two to four years old. S. leucomaenis inhabits the waters of the Far East, where the subspecies 5. alpinus malma (the Dolly Var-den) is also found. Although the meat of the char has excellent flavor, the fish has only slight commercial importance.

REFERENCE

Berg, L. S. Ryby presnykh vod SSSR i sopredel’nykh stran, 4th ed., parts 1–2. Moscow-Leningrad, 1948–49.

G. I. LINDBERG