# semiography
## English
### Alternative forms

* semeiography

### Etymology

From semio- +‎ -graphy.

### Pronunciation

* Rhymes: -ɒɡɹəfi

### Noun

semiography (usually uncountable, plural semiographies)
* (medicine) A description of the signs of disease.
** 1832, J. Hope, “A Treatise on the Diseases of the Heart and Great Vessels, comprising a new View of the Physiology of the Heart's Action, according to which the Physical Signs are explaiend”, in The Edinburgh Medical and Surgical Journal, volume 37, number 3, page 403:In treating of the semiography of the disease, Dr Hope restores to its place among the rational signs, that of jugular venous pulsation, or turgescence of the jugular veins, with pulsation synchronous with that of the arteries, originally specified by Lancisi, but rejected on insufficient grounds by Corvisart.
** 1848, David Craigie, Elements of General and Pathological Anatomy, page 180:The most perplexing part of the semiography and symptomatology is this, that these purulent collections cause almost no uneasy feelings, till by their size they induce distension or painful stretching of the organ, or pressure or tension of some of the surrounding parts.
** 2013, Fritz Henn, Norman Sartorius, Hanfried Helmchen, Contemporary Psychiatry, page 309:In other words, the semiography of the disorder connotes a criminal act.
* (linguistics, semiotics) A system of symbolic notation, especially (but not always) as opposed to phonetic notation.
** 2001, Roland Barthes, “Masson's semiography”, in Jed Rasula, Steve McCaffery, editor, Imagining Language: An Anthology, page 46:Masson's semiography, rectifying millennia of scrptorial history, refers us not to origins (what do we care about origins?) but to the body: it imposes upon us not the form (banal proposition of all pointers) but the figure, i.e., the elliptical collision of two signifiers: the gesture beneath every ideogram as a kind of evaporated figurative outline, and the gesture of the painter, of the calligrapher, which makes the brush move according to his body.
** 2003, Florian Coulmas, Writing Systems: An Introduction to Their Linguistic Analysis, page 18:As exemplified by the above quotes, both meaning-based writing, or semiography, and sound-based writing, or phonography, have been envisioned by influential thinkers who viewed the graphic expression of pure reason and pure sound, respectively, as ideals to be pursued in the design of writing systems.
** 2013, R. Malatesha Joshi, P.G. Aaron, Handbook of Orthography and Literacy:The fact that the semiography of French is specific and complex is due to its history, which, as we mentioned at the beginning, sets it apart from all the other Romance languages.
** 2013, Vittorio Ingegnoli, Landscape Ecology: A Widening Foundation, page 171:Semiography may be very useful for studies of landscape pathology.
* (more specifically) A system of musical notation.
** 1980, Johann von Gardner, Vladimir Morosan, Russian Church Singing, page 115:Metallov further assumed that Græco-Syrian semiography came to Russia through Mt. Athos; but as we mentioned earlier, Athos at that time was still relatively young as a monastic state, although it was inhabited by monks of various countries.
** 2016, Mikša Gligo, “Graphic notation and musical graphics: The nonnotational sign systems in new music and its multimedial, intermedial, extended-medial, and mixed-medial character”, in Winfried Nöth, editor, Semiotics of the Media, page 741:Musical semiography seldom takes into account the obvious loss of the mediating function in some primarily graphic features of contemporary music notations, which differ greatly from conventional notation, as a standardly efficient mediator between the composer's idea, its notational fixation in a set of instructions to the performer, whose playing (i.e., the realization of these instructions in sound) brings music as a meaningful message to the ear, and the mind of a listener.
** 2023, Alberto Turco, The Gregorian Melody: The Expressive Power of the Word, page 57:The choice of the square-note semiography was not motivated by a nostalgic affection for tradition, but rather by the intuition that the graphic placement of the pitches could express a rhythmic significance.
* The study of symbolic systems or of a particular symbolic system.
** 1996, Semiotic Society of America, Semiotics, page 201:Abundant graphic documentation of Frutiger's work, together with the books by Shepherd and Dreyfus, serve as the basis for modern comprehension of the principles of semiography.
** 2007, Bennetta Jules-Rosette, Josephine Baker in Art and Life: The Icon and the Image, page 5:While documentation of a life is essential to semiography, as it is to biography, semiography's focus is to interpret how the pieces of the puzzle fit together as a cultural production rather than a chonology. Semiography explores the ideal images of a performer, the public performances in which those images appear, and the responses of diverse audiences to the performer's decisions, actions, and experimentation.
** 2010, Thomas A. Sebeok, Jean Umiker-Sebeok, The Semiotic Web 1987, page 515:Semiography enables its practitioners to formulate testable hypotheses of a probabilistic nature using one-to-n-step Markov chains (Maranda 1976, 1978, 1984a, 1985b) .
** 2019, Leonid Tchertov, Signs, Codes, Spaces, and Arts, page 22:Semiography includes all special disciplines studying particular types of semiotic means—a grammar of a verbal language, heraldry, road signs, etc. In such a conceptual system, the linguistics of one language or another must also be related to the field of semiography.

### Anagrams

* myographies