from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
- n. A written symbol representing an entire spoken word without expressing its pronunciation; for example, for 4 read "four” in English, "quattro” in Italian. Also called ideogram, logograph.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
- n. A character or symbol that represents a word or phrase (e.g. a character of the Chinese writing system).
- n. A graphical symbol representing a concept or thing, as in roadside signs; a logo.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English
- n. A word letter; a phonogram, that, for the sake of brevity, represents a word. Cf. grammalogue.
from The Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- n. A word-sign; a single written character, or a combination of characters regarded as a unit, representing a whole word.
- n. A versified puzzle containing synonyms of a number of words derived from a single word by recombining its letters, the solution depending upon the guessing of the derived words from the synonyms, and the discovery from the former of the original word.
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- n. a single written symbol that represents an entire word or phrase without indicating its pronunciation
The ampersand is an example of a logogram, which is a single character formed from the combination of two or more characters the & is a blending of the letters e and t. madCanada says:
Davydov refers to what Pushkin does with P-L-T as a 'logogram', citing F. de Saussure's definition of this as 'a
Aside from the damage to the tablet over time, the difficulty facing Herod in determining the precise meaning of the logogram that he was examining lay in the difference between the Sumerian and Akkadian languages.
RA3 is a rare sign in Linear B, and it only occurs as a logogram in Linear A: nevertheless, we can be certain that the two signs are the same, since Lin B also uses the phrase E-RA3-WA for olive-oil Lin A simply uses RA3.
The site of John Younger fails to give counterparts of Lin B RA3 and RO2, but it is quite obvious that they correspond to Lin A *122 (=logogram OLE) and Lin A *315 (a purely phonetic sign), respectively.
Another misogynistic story tells of how Cangjie was kicked out of his house when his wife's two sisters came for a visit, which caused him to create the logogram for "rape" out of three pictograms of "woman".
For example, this ur-lexicographer was driven out of his house when his mother and his wife had a fight, so he decided to create the logogram for "trouble" with two pictograms for "woman" with a pictogram of "roof" over them.
Although the same ideograph, or rather logogram, was used to designate the Chinese scholar and the Japanese warrior as well, yet the former was man of the pen only, while the latter was man of the pen and of two swords.
Syllabic signs using the rebus principle, which is the use of a word or pictographic symbol for the sounds it makes disregarding its meaning, developed signs based of the logogram signs.
The best I can do by way of being faithful to Pushkin's P-L-T logogram is to use the word 'turncoat' at two significant moments.