The irreducible characters of a finite group G tend to be listed in a character table. This concisely represents a lot of information about G and its normal subgroups. As an example the character table of S4 is:
| e | (123) | (12)(34) | (12) | (1234) |
χ1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 |
χ2 | 1 | 1 | 1 | –1 | –1 |
χ3 | 3 | –0 | –1 | –1 | –1 |
χ4 | 3 | 0 | –1 | –1 | 1 |
χ5 | 2 | –1 | 2 | 0 | 0 |
Characters are constant on conjugacy classes, so one representative per class is shown. There are as many irreducible representations (rows) as there are conjugacy classes (columns). The degrees of the characters appear in the first column, and the order of G is the sum of their squares; here 24 = 1 + 1 + 9 + 9 + 4. The first listed character is the trivial character, associated with the representation φ(g) = I1 for all g.