characteristic curve

American  

noun

1. Photography. a graph used in sensitometry to show the relationship between exposure time and image density under constant developing conditions.

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characteristic curve British  

noun

1. photog a graph of the density of a particular photographic material plotted against the logarithm of the exposure producing this density

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Etymology

Origin of characteristic curve

First recorded in 1900–05

Example Sentences

Techniques such as “receiver operating characteristic curve analysis” examine how changing the threshold for an alert alters the balance between correctly identifying real events and mistakenly flagging harmless ones.

From Salon • May 12, 2026

The stem is attached at the concave margin, where the cap is auriculate and has a prominent boss or elevation, and bent at right angles with a characteristic curve.

From Studies of American Fungi. Mushrooms, Edible, Poisonous, etc. by Atkinson, George Francis

It will usually be advisable to ask the dealer to show you a characteristic curve for the transformer, which will indicate how well the transformer operates at the different frequencies in the audio range.

From Letters of a Radio-Engineer to His Son by Mills, John

Even so, the data are far too scanty to yield a really characteristic curve; but the continuous curve, which sums up the results of the eleven years, is more reliable, and obviously more satisfactory.

From Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 The Evolution of Modesty; The Phenomena of Sexual Periodicity; Auto-Erotism by Ellis, Havelock

And yet—and yet Ethelred P. Wyndhurst was like Isaac—that characteristic curve of the nose, those thick eyebrows!

From Ghetto Tragedies by Zangwill, Israel