Chinese characters are examples of " ideograms ", and many have specific logographic qualities or functions.

* Pictographic ideograms or pictograms ( 象形字 ) -- characters that adhere most to the pictorial origins of the word-form surviving from Bronze-age China, e. g. the characters for " human ", " big ", " mountain ", " mouth " and " sun ", which are easily recognisable as straightforward pictorial derivations from their Bronze-age counterparts ;

* Referential ideograms ( 指事字 ) -- characters that are developed with specific reference to particular entities or events in the " outside " world, whose meanings could not be simply and straightforwardly traced pictorially, phonetically, or inferentially through the internal meaning structure of the ideogram itself, e. g. the character for " clock ", which combines the pictogram for " gold " ( or " metal ") with the pictogram for " children ";

Japanese writing evolved from Chinese script and Chinese characters, called kanji, or ideograms, were adopted to represent Japanese words and grammar.

The two Japanese syllabaries are themselves adapted from the Grass Script versions of the Chinese characters ; the hiragana being direct adaptations and the katakana being adapted from the hiragana ( both katakana and hiragana are in everyday use alongside the Chinese characters known as kanji ; the kanji, being developed in parallel to the Chinese characters, have their own idiosyncracies, but Chinese and Japanese ideograms are largely comprehensible, even if their use in the languages are not the same.

One possible rationale is the desire to limit the size of the full Unicode character set, where CJK characters as represented by discrete ideograms may approach or exceed 100, 000 ( while those required for ordinary literacy in any language are probably under 3, 000 ).

Simplified Chinese ideograms were also officially introduced at the time, though many such simplified characters have existed for hundreds of years.

In older literature, Chinese characters in general may be referred to as ideograms, due toe the misconception that characters represented ideas directly, whereas in fact they do so only through association with the spoken word.

Roughly a quarter of these characters are pictograms while the rest are either phono-semantic compounds or compound ideograms.

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.

Examples of ideograms include wayfinding signs, such as in airports and other environments where many people may not be familiar with the language of the place they are in, as well as Arabic numerals and formal languages ( mathematical notation, logic, UML ), which are used worldwide regardless of how they are pronounced in different languages.

As a result, only a few of the thousands of ideograms people see are recognized without a name.

Logograms are often commonly known also as " ideograms ".

Strictly speaking, however, ideograms represent ideas directly rather than words and morphemes, and none of the logographic systems described here are truly ideographic.

# The second type are ideograms that attempt to visualize abstract concepts, such as 上 " up " and 下 " down ".

Also considered ideograms are pictograms with an ideographic indicator ; for instance, 刀 is a pictogram meaning " knife ", while 刃 is an ideogram meaning " blade ".

Amongst the earliest are cave painting, runic alphabets and ideograms.

Both the Koreans and the Japanese make use of Chinese ideograms in their written language, whose Chinese origins are not disputed.

Current estimates are that " wago " ( i. e. words attributable to the original Yaoyi language ) make up 33. 8 % of the Japanese lexicon, that " kango " ( i. e. words with roots borrowed from Chinese since the 5th century CE ) make up 49. 1 % of Japanese words ( and in addition, the Chinese ideograms used in the Japanese written language ), that foreign words called gairaigo make up 8. 8 % of Japanese words, and that 8. 3 % of Japanese words are konshugo that draw upon multiple languages.

Due to the Chinese writing system, however, the interpretations of Chinese historical sources are based on supposed correspondences of ideograms – and their possible phonetic equivalents – with known toponyms in the ancient Southeast Asian civilizations.

There are also typefaces of ideograms and symbols ( e. g. mathematical or for map making ).

The Vinča culture may have created the earliest system of writing, the Vinča signs, though it is almost universally accepted amongst archeologists that the Sumerian cuneiform script was the earliest true form of writing and the Vinča signs most likely represented pictograms and ideograms rather than a truly developed form of writing.

Writing appears to have developed between the 7th millennium BC and the 4th millennium BC, first in the form of early mnemonic symbols which became a system of ideograms or pictographs through simplification.

Abilgaard used pictorial allegory like ideograms, to communicate ideas and transmit messages through symbols to a refined public that was initiated into this form of symbology.

" Lewis adds, " As cosmopolitan an artist as he would later become, his storehouse of visual imagery would never expand beyond the landscape of his childhood, with its snowy streets, wooden houses, and ubiquitous fiddlers ... scenes of childhood so indelibly in one's mind and to invest them with an emotional charge so intense that it could only be discharged obliquely through an obsessive repetition of the same cryptic symbols and ideograms ... "

The whole façade is covered in pictograms, from the original ideograms of the whole world.

* Phonetic loan ideograms ( 假借字 ) -- where a pictographically simple ideogram is " borrowed " to represent a pictographically complex ideogram which has the same or similar sounds to the pictographically simpler one, resulting in the same simple ideogram representing two or more different words, even though the similar-sounding words often have very different meanings.

* Inferential ideograms ( 会意字 ) -- the combination of pictograms or pictographic parts to create a new character that pictorially mimicks the intended meaning of the new word, e. g. the character for " love ", which combines the pictograms for " heart " as the radical with the pictogram for " receive "; the character for " sharp ", which combines the pictogram " small " at the top with the pictogram for " big " at the bottom ; or the character for " room ", which combines the pictogram for " household " overarching the pictogram for " square ";

Hittite glossary: words of known or conjectured meaning, with Sumerian ideograms and Accadian words common in Hittite texts.

Frahang-i Pahlavīg ( meaning " Pahlavig dictionary ") is a dictionary of ( mostly ) Aramaic ideograms with Middle Persian translations ( in Pahlavi script ) and transliterations ( in Pazend / Avestan script ).

Even if Sitchin is referring to written rather than to spoken language, it is unlikely that his contention can be persuasively defended, since Sumerian ideograms were preceded by the Azilian and Tartarian signaries of Europe as well as by a variety of script-like notational systems between the Nile and Indus rivers.

There is an aperture setting switch on the camera with two positions indicated by pictorial ideograms: sunny and cloudy, with a nominal value of and, respectively.

However, neither of these spoken languages is closely related to the spoken Chinese language, and need not be because ideograms do not code phonetic versions of the ideas that they describe.

From the few surviving examples of this script on coins and artifacts it has been observed that written Khwarezmian included Aramaic logograms or ideograms, that is Aramaic words written to represent native spoken ones.

( McLuhan is careful to distinguish the phonetic alphabet from logographic / logogramic writing systems, like hieroglyphics or ideograms.

Stroke-based fonts are heavily marketed for East Asian markets for use on embedded devices, but the technology is not limited to ideograms.

The most obvious change is the disappearance of ideograms, which were frequent and represented a significant part of Linear A.

Although large script mostly uses logograms, it is possible that ideograms and syllabograms are used for grammatical functions.

Inside the cave, they find a series of ideograms on the walls, which Simon is able to translate-thanks to his vast intellect.

The ideograms tell of the Prince of Plenty being sacrificed on a full moon, which is tonight.

One of its distinguishing characteristics is the tripling of ideograms, phonograms, and determinatives to indicate the plural.

Second, it had a high incidence of Aramaic words, rendered as ideograms or logograms, that is, they were written Aramaic words but understood as Parthian ones ( See Arsacid Pahlavi for details ).