Board Thread:Site Problems and Appearance/@comment-4854965-20141201172726/@comment-4854965-20141201221640

Mr B Natural wrote: Well the word "recur" is composed of "occur" and the prefix "re" meaning "again". So technically, "recur" means "occurring again", in other words, more than once. So a recurring character is anyone who appears more than once, regardless of whether or not they have lines. What you're thinking of is backround characters, which are characters that have little or no significance to the plot. Backround characters can be recurring or nonrecurring, just like more important characters.

Now who counts as a recurring character vs. a main character? By my definition, you have to appear and play at least a semisignificant role in every episode (shorts don't count) to be a main character. So in my opinion, Soos is not a main character (he wasn't in E8), but most people disagree with me there. I was going for more minor character versus recurring character. I understand the etymology of the word, but appearing in the background twice doesn't seem (to me) to be reappearing, but more as appearing twice.

The only reason I thought of this was actually from some lab work I did over the summer (I created, for both myself and the people looking at the data, a standard for why things were put into certain categories)