logogram
Sign in to savethumb|Egyptian hieroglyphs, including logograms such as the sun disk (⊙, visible several times here)
AI overview
A logogram is a written symbol that represents an entire word or meaningful unit of language, rather than just a sound or letter. They were used in writing systems like Egyptian hieroglyphics, where a single symbol—such as a sun disk—could stand for a complete word or concept.
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Article
18 sectionsContents
- Types of logographic systems
- Logoconsonantal
- <span class="anchor" id="Morphosyllabic"></span><span class="anchor" id="morphosyllabic"></span> Logosyllabic
- Others
- Semantic and phonetic dimensions
- Universal logograms
- Chinese characters
- Chinese characters used in Japanese and Korean
- Differences in processing of logographic and phonologic writing systems
- Advantages and disadvantages
- Separating writing and pronunciation
- Characters in information technology
- See also
- Notes
- References
- Citations
- Sources
- External links
thumb|Egyptian hieroglyphs, including logograms such as the sun disk (⊙, visible several times here)
In a written language, a logogram (from Ancient Greek 'word', and 'that which is drawn or written'), also logograph or lexigraph, is a written character that represents a semantic component of a language, such as a word or morpheme. Chinese characters as used in Chinese as well as other languages are logograms, as are Egyptian hieroglyphs and characters in cuneiform script. A writing system that primarily uses logograms is called a logography. Non-logographic writing systems, such as alphabets and syllabaries, are phonemic: their individual symbols represent sounds directly and lack any inherent meaning. However, all known logographies have some phonetic component, generally based on the rebus principle, and the addition of a phonetic component to pure ideographs is considered to be a key innovation in enabling the writing system to adequately encode human language.