Sentence:  Show that the <WSD>determinant</WSD> of a Hermitian matrix is real and that of a skew-Hermitian matrix is imaginary. 
Meaning of the word marked with <WSD> tags:  A scalar that encodes certain characteristics of a given transformation matrix; the unique scalar function over square matrices which is distributive over matrix multiplication, multilinear in the rows and columns, and takes the value 1 for the unit matrix; "abbreviated as:" det.