   an ideogram or ideograph (from greek  idÃ©a "idea" +  grÃ¡phÅ "to write") is a graphic symbol that represents an idea or concept, independent of any particular language, and specific words or phrases. some ideograms are comprehensible only by familiarity with prior convention; others convey their meaning through pictorial resemblance to a physical object, and thus may also be referred to as pictograms. ==terminology==  the term "ideogram" is commonly used to describe logograms in writing systems such as egyptian hieroglyphs, sumerian cuneiform and chinese characters. dongba symbols used without geba annotation are an example of a real ideographic system (it is also a pictographic system). in the history of writing, symbols proceeded from ideographic (such as an icon of a bull's head in a list inventory, denoting that the following numeral refers to head of cattle) to logographic (an icon of a bull denoting the semitic word Ê¾Älep "ox"), to phonetic (the bull's head used as a symbol in rebus writing, indicating the glottal stop at the beginning of the word for "ox", namely, the letter aleph). bronze age writing systems used a combination of these applications, and many signs in hieroglyphic as well as in cuneiform writing could be used either logographically or phonetically. for example, the akkadian sign an () could be an ideograph for "deity", an ideogram for the god anum in particular, a logograph for the akkadian stem il- "deity", a logograph for the akkadian word Å¡amu "sky", or a syllabogram for either the syllable an or il. although chinese characters are logograms, two of the smaller classes in the traditional classification are ideographic in origin: * simple ideographs (æäºå­ zhÇshÃ¬zÃ¬) are abstract symbols such as ä¸ shÃ ng "up" and ä¸ xiÃ  "down" or numerals such as ä¸ sÄn "three". * semantic compounds (ä¼æå­ huÃ¬yÃ¬zÃ¬) are semantic combinations of characters, such as æ mÃ­ng "bright", composed of æ¥ rÃ¬ "sun" and æ yuÃ¨ "moon", or ä¼ xiÅ« "rest", composed of äºº rÃ©n "person" and æ¨ mÃ¹ "tree
Communication_design Graphic_design Pictograms Writing_systems