Art & MusicGreek → English
Logo
/ˈloʊɡoʊ/noun
A designed mark that identifies a company or product at a glance.
The Greek roots
λόγος
lógos
word, account
Literally: “word”
Follow a root:λόγος73 words
The story of the word
Printers of the early 19th century cast single slugs of type carrying a whole word and called them logotypes. Advertising clipped that to logo in the 1930s, by which point the thing meant was a drawn mark rather than a lump of metal. The λόγος inside it is the same word that ends biology and opens the Gospel of John.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → modern coinage → English
- First recorded
- 1937
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
logotypelogicdialoguelogarithm
In a sentence
They spent four months and a fortune on a logo that is basically a circle.