Other forms: temperaments
A person's temperament is the emotional weather they are born with — calm or anxious, cheerful or brooding, quick to anger or slow to move. It is what is there before life does anything to it.
That is what separates it from character and personality. Character is what you have made of yourself and can be praised; temperament is closer to raw material and is rarely anybody's fault. The word also has a second life in music, where equal temperament is the tuning system that lets a piano play in every key, and the connection is real: both senses come from tempering, meaning mixing in the right proportions. And an artistic temperament is a polite way of saying somebody is difficult.
1nountemperamentA person's natural disposition — the way they tend to feel and react.
“He has the temperament for long, slow work.”
synonyms: disposition, nature
2nountendencyA tendency to be excitable or difficult.
“Great players often come with a certain temperament.”
3nounmusicIn music, a system for tuning the intervals of a scale.
“The piece was written before equal temperament was standard.”
temperament is a natural disposition.
Latin temperamentum meant a proper mixture, from temperare, to blend. Medieval medicine held that a person's nature came from the mix of four humours in the body, and temperament was the word for that mix. The medicine has gone; the word for the resulting disposition has stayed.
Latin
temperāmentum
Middle French
tempérament
Middle English
temperament
English, today
temperament
Middle English temperament, borrowed from Middle French tempérament, from Latin temperāmentum.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA