IDEOGRAPHIC

Ideographic refers to systems or elements that convey meaning rather than sound. In linguistics and writing, ideographic writing uses logograms or ideographs to represent morphemes, words, or ideas, rather than phonetic values.

In practice, true ideographic scripts are rare. Most so-called ideographic writing combines semantic and phonetic components. Chinese characters are often described as logographic; each character generally corresponds to a word or morpheme, though pronunciation varies across dialects and characters may include phonetic elements. Other ancient scripts, such as Egyptian hieroglyphs and some cuneiform signs, functioned at least partly as ideograms or logograms. In Japanese, kanji are used similarly, with kana providing pronunciation.

The term ideographic is sometimes used loosely to describe any symbol that conveys meaning, but in scholarly usage it contrasts with phonographic systems that encode sounds, such as alphabets and syllabaries. The concept is central to discussions of writing development and literacy, as ideographic writing requires memorization of a large repertoire of characters and often involves enduring semantic-phonetic dualities.

In modern typography and Unicode, the category of ideographs includes many characters designated as logographs in East Asian scripts, collectively known as CJK ideographs (characters used in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean texts). The idea that a single symbol maps unambiguously to a single word is simplified; many characters cover multiple meanings and readings.