logograph

A logograph is a written symbol that represents a word or morpheme rather than a spoken sound. In a logographic writing system, signs convey lexical meaning, and the pronunciation of a word must be learned separately rather than being directly indicated by the symbol. Many logographic systems rely on a large repertoire of signs to cover vocabulary.

Etymology and scope: The term logograph comes from Greek logos, meaning “word,” and graphos, meaning “writing.” A logogram may stand for a single word or a meaningful unit such as a morpheme; some signs carry multiple meanings or pronunciations in different languages or contexts. Logographic writing is typically contrasted with alphabetic or syllabic systems, where symbols primarily express sounds.

Examples and usage: Chinese characters (hanzi) are widely described as logographs because each character typically encodes a morpheme and often a syllable. Japanese kanji are Chinese-origin logographs used alongside syllabaries. Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs included true logograms for common words, while Sumerian cuneiform began as logographic signs and later incorporated phonetic elements, resulting in mixed scripts. In modern linguistics, the term helps distinguish signs that primarily convey meaning from those that convey sound.

Relation to other concepts: A logogram represents a word or morpheme, whereas an ideogram expresses a concept independent of linguistic form, and a pictograph is a stylized picture of an object. In practice, the boundaries among these categories can blur within a writing system. Today, logography is most closely associated with Chinese and its adaptations, such as kanji in Japanese.

In digital contexts, logographic signs are encoded as characters within character encoding schemes like Unicode.