pictogram

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pictogram

(text)

(Or "pictograph") A symbol which is a picture that represents an object or concept, e.g. a picture of an envelope used to represent an e-mail message.

Pictograms are common in everyday life, e.g. signs in public places or roads, whereas the term "icon" is specific to interfaces on computers or other electronic devices.

Compare: ideogram.

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References in periodicals archive ?

I learned that what I had assumed to be an early pictographic script had itself originated in the interpretation of puzzling symbols which represented absolutely nothing.

Apparently the pictographic script had changed many times to form more abstract symbols--by the simplification of the figures into outlines in which it was no longer possible to read the model, or else by the ingrowth of tangles of lines--and many times, too, the abstract symbols turned back into pictures, once their outlines began to live and grow, the tangles of lines yielding the figures of humans and demons, animals, birds, and monsters, which till then had been present only in the shapes of the letters as distant dreams or reflected reflections--as memory and suggestion.

Although in the days when I was on the island, a tendency towards a pictographic script was predominant, one could see many other tendencies dormant under the surface of their texts--some on the wane, some just being born.