Abstract. We investigate the growth of the Nevanlinna Characteristic of f (z + η) for a fixed η ∈ C in this paper. In particular, we obtain a precise asymptotic relation between T`r, f (z + η)´and T (r, f ), which is only true for finite order meromorphic functions. We have also obtained the proximity function and pointwise estimates of f (z + η)/f (z) which is a discrete version of the classical logarithmic derivative estimates of f (z). We apply these results to give new growth estimates of meromorphic solutions to higher order linear difference equations. This also allows us to solve an old problem of Whittaker [40] concerning a first order difference equation. We show by giving a number of examples that all of our results are best possible in certain senses. Finally, we give a direct proof of a result in Ablowitz, Halburd and Herbst [1] concerning integrable difference equations.