Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun A written symbol representing an entire spoken word without expressing its pronunciation; for example, for 4 read “four” in English, “quattro” in Italian.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun A word-sign; a single written character, or a combination of characters regarded as a unit, representing a whole word.
  • noun A versified puzzle containing synonyms of a number of words derived from a single word by recombining its letters, the solution depending upon the guessing of the derived words from the synonyms, and the discovery from the former of the original word.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun A word letter; a phonogram, that, for the sake of brevity, represents a word. Cf. grammalogue.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun A character or symbol that represents a word or phrase (e.g. a character of the Chinese writing system).
  • noun A graphical symbol representing a concept or thing, as in roadside signs; a logo.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun a single written symbol that represents an entire word or phrase without indicating its pronunciation

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

logo- + -gram

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Examples

  • The ampersand is an example of a logogram, which is a single character formed from the combination of two or more characters the & is a blending of the letters e and t. madCanada says:

    Friday! August 07 – The Bleat. 2009

  • Davydov refers to what Pushkin does with P-L-T as a 'logogram', citing F. de Saussure's definition of this as 'a

    openDemocracy 2010

  • Davydov refers to what Pushkin does with P-L-T as a 'logogram', citing F. de Saussure's definition of this as 'a

    openDemocracy Robert Chandler 2010

  • Aside from the damage to the tablet over time, the difficulty facing Herod in determining the precise meaning of the logogram that he was examining lay in the difference between the Sumerian and Akkadian languages.

    The Whisperers John Connolly 2010

  • Aside from the damage to the tablet over time, the difficulty facing Herod in determining the precise meaning of the logogram that he was examining lay in the difference between the Sumerian and Akkadian languages.

    The Whisperers John Connolly 2010

  • RA3 is a rare sign in Linear B, and it only occurs as a logogram in Linear A: nevertheless, we can be certain that the two signs are the same, since Lin B also uses the phrase E-RA3-WA for olive-oil Lin A simply uses RA3.

    New info on 'lily' 2010

  • The site of John Younger fails to give counterparts of Lin B RA3 and RO2, but it is quite obvious that they correspond to Lin A *122 (=logogram OLE) and Lin A *315 (a purely phonetic sign), respectively.

    New info on 'lily' 2010

  • Another misogynistic story tells of how Cangjie was kicked out of his house when his wife's two sisters came for a visit, which caused him to create the logogram for "rape" out of three pictograms of "woman".

    Word meaning as a window into thought josh 2008

  • For example, this ur-lexicographer was driven out of his house when his mother and his wife had a fight, so he decided to create the logogram for "trouble" with two pictograms for "woman" with a pictogram of "roof" over them.

    Word meaning as a window into thought josh 2008

  • Although the same ideograph, or rather logogram, was used to designate the Chinese scholar and the Japanese warrior as well, yet the former was man of the pen only, while the latter was man of the pen and of two swords.

    The Religions of Japan From the Dawn of History to the Era of Méiji William Elliot Griffis 1885

Comments

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  • Not, in fact, a message written on a poo.

    August 7, 2008