Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun A representation of words in the form of pictures or symbols, often presented as a puzzle.
from The Century Dictionary.
- noun A puzzle or riddle consisting of words or phrases represented by figures or pictures of objects whose names resemble in sound those words or phrases or the syllables of which they are composed; an enigmatical representation of words by means of figures or pictures suggestive of them.
- noun In heraldry:
- noun A bearing or succession of bearings which make up the name or a word expressing the profession or office of the bearer.
- noun A motto in which a part of the phrase is expressed by representations of objects instead of by words.
- To mark with a rebus; indicate by a rebus.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- noun A mode of expressing words and phrases by pictures of objects whose names resemble those words, or the syllables of which they are composed; enigmatical representation of words by figures; hence, a peculiar form of riddle made up of such representations.
- noun (Her.) A pictorial suggestion on a coat of arms of the name of the person to whom it belongs. See Canting arms, under
Canting . - transitive verb To mark or indicate by a rebus.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun A kind of word
puzzle which uses pictures to represent words or parts of words. - verb transitive To mark or indicate by a rebus.
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- noun a puzzle where you decode a message consisting of pictures representing syllables and words
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
Support
Help support Wordnik (and make this page ad-free) by adopting the word rebus.
Examples
-
A secret society manipulating the course of history so that matters would come out right would not, in rebus ipses, be thought a thing worth fighting by a skiffy reader.
July 25th, 2008 m_francis 2008
-
Gero Pius Caputsapiens (Germanice Weishaupt), persona in rebus
04/01/2004 - 05/01/2004 John 2004
-
The next step is what we might call rebus-writing, where not the thing itself was meant but the sound.
The Prehistoric World; or, Vanished races Emory Adams Allen
-
This difficult but all-important step appears to have been taken through the use of the rebus, that is, writing words by pictures of objects which stand for sounds.
Early European History Hutton Webster
-
In the case of _Quetzalcoatl_ or CUKULCAN, the rebus was the means of getting the name; and if the names of this divinity had not been equivalent in the two tongues, our results would have led us to the
-
The rebus is the bridge from the writing of thoughts to the writing of sounds, and it came into use through the necessity of writing proper names.
The Booklover and His Books Harry Lyman Koopman 1898
-
This is pictorial phonetism; and pictorial phonetism is, in fact, pictorial punning, of the sort commonly known as the rebus, or charade.
-
His rebus is a ram wearing a collar with the letters R.Y.G.E. inscribed on it.
Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Saint Albans With an Account of the Fabric & a Short History of the Abbey Thomas Perkins 1874
-
According to the dictionary, a rebus is a representation of words or syllables depicted by pictures of objects or by symbols whose names resemble the intended words or syllables in sound; a riddle made up of pictures or symbols.
-
According to the dictionary, a rebus is a representation of words or syllables depicted by pictures of objects or by symbols whose names resemble the intended words or syllables in sound; a riddle made up of pictures or symbols.
Comments
Log in or sign up to get involved in the conversation. It's quick and easy.