Cuneiform determinatives

thumb|250x250px|The dingir sign worshiped by two figures on a cylinder seal from [[Mitanni, 16th–14th century BC]] Dingir ⟨⟩, usually transliterated DIĜIR, () is a Sumerian word for 'god' or 'goddess'. Its cuneiform sign is most commonly employed as the determinative for religious names and related concepts, in which case it is not pronounced and is conventionally transliterated as a superscript ⟨d⟩, e.g.

thumb|Detail of the Sumerian statue of Lugal-dalu, King of Adab – as stated in the inscription of circa mid-3rd millennium BC, inscription including the Sumerian cuneiform sign of '''' (Sumerian: ) is the Sumerian term for "king, ruler". Literally, the term means "big man". In Sumerian, lú "𒇽" is "man" and gal'' "𒃲" is "great", or "big".

A determinative, also known as a taxogram or semagram, is an ideogram used to mark semantic categories of words in logographic scripts which helps to disambiguate interpretation. They have no direct counterpart in spoken language, though they may derive historically from glyphs for real words, and functionally they resemble classifiers in East Asian and sign languages. For example, Egyptian hieroglyphic determinatives include symbols for divinities, people, parts of the body, animals, plants, and books/abstract ideas, which helped in reading but were not pronounced.

Sumerian word or symbol for house or temple

sumerian word

Unicode character