In previous work (Dawsey et al. in J Algebra 533:339–343, 2019), the authors confirmed speculation of J.G. Thompson that certain multiquadratic fields are generated by specified character values sufficiently large alternating groups $$A_n$$
. Here we address natural generalization this to finite general linear $$\mathrm {GL}_m\left( {{\mathbb {F}}}_q\right) $$
and {SL}_2\left(