logography

Logography is a writing system in which the basic units of written language are logograms—signs that represent words or morphemes—rather than individual phonemes. In a logographic system, a single symbol can convey meaning without indicating precisely how it is spoken, though many logograms also carry phonetic or phonologically suggestive information.

Widely cited examples include Chinese characters, which are often described as logographic because many characters correspond to morphemes or whole words. Other historical systems, such as the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs and Mesopotamian cuneiform, began with pictographic signs and evolved to include logograms alongside syllabic and phonetic signs. In practice, many so‑called logographic scripts are hybrid, combining logograms with phonetic components to indicate pronunciation or grammatical information.

Distinctions among writing systems vary by linguist. A true logography relies on logograms, while a purely phonetic system uses symbols for phonemes (alphabets) or syllables (syllabaries). In many languages, signs may be morphosyllabic or logophonemic, meaning signs represent morphemes, syllables, or both, sometimes with semantic cues that aid interpretation.

In the modern era, logographic scripts face particular challenges and advantages. Large inventories of signs require substantial learning effort, but logograms can convey meaning across dialects and may represent concepts that are not easily reduced to phonetics. Digital encoding in Unicode supports extensive, standardized representation of logographic characters, and input methods often rely on phonetic keyboards or character-based selectors to locate signs efficiently.