pictograph
Americannoun
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a pictorial sign or symbol.
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a record consisting of pictorial symbols, as a prehistoric cave drawing or a graph or chart with symbolic figures representing a certain number of people, cars, factories, etc.
noun
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a picture or symbol standing for a word or group of words, as in written Chinese
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a chart on which symbols are used to represent values, such as population levels or consumption
Other Word Forms
Etymology
Origin of pictograph
1850–55; < Latin pict ( us ) painted ( see picture) + -o- + -graph
Explanation
A pictograph is a picture or image that represents a word or a phrase. A sign with the shape of a dog inside a circle and a slash drawn through it is a pictograph that means "no dogs allowed." Anything that conveys information using just pictures can be called a pictograph. When you click on an icon on your computer, that's a pictograph, and when you text an emoji to your friend, that's another kind of pictograph. Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs and early Chinese characters are also pictographs, or symbols that represent various words. Pictograph comes from the Latin pictus, "painted," and the Greek graphe, "writing."
Vocabulary lists containing pictograph
Write On!: Graph and Gram
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Mesopotamia - Introductory
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Early Civilizations of China, Lessons 1–3
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Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
Together, the roof and the tower give the chapel a beguiling silhouette that can suggest anything from a giant pictograph to an abstract sculpture.
From The Wall Street Journal • Mar. 6, 2026
More specifically, because I read some signs, I can tell you that the petroglyphs are more than 2,000 years old, and also that a petroglyph is cut into stone; a pictograph is painted on stone.
From Los Angeles Times • May 31, 2024
I’ve lost my appetite for cricket, so I tap on the pictograph of a lab-generated wrap produced from plant cells and lamb genes, then scan my hand.
From Slate • Feb. 26, 2022
As emojis come to represent the world more specifically and fully, they collide with the thorny reality that they reduce to a pictograph.
From The New Yorker • Jul. 22, 2019
It a rude pictograph, a rough sketch, map-like, of a winding river—another and smaller one separated from the first by a chain of mountains.
From Warrior Gap A Story of the Sioux Outbreak of '68. by King, Charles
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
