Words & WritingGreek → English
Ideogram
/ˈɪdiəɡræm/noun
A written character that stands for a thing or idea rather than for a sound.
The Greek roots
ἰδέα
idéa
form, notion
γράμμα
grámma
letter, thing written
Literally: “idea-writing”
The story of the word
Coined in the 1830s, largely to describe Chinese, and largely wrong about it: the great majority of Chinese characters pair a meaning element with a phonetic one, so they encode sound as well as sense. True ideograms are rarer than the word suggests, and most of the ones we meet daily are road signs and washing labels. ἰδέα comes from ἰδεῖν, to see, so an idea was first of all a look or a shape.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → French → English
- First recorded
- 1830s
Same family
ideaideologytelegramgrammardiagram
In a sentence
The arrow and the crossed-out cigarette are ideograms; they work in any language.