ideographicadj.n.

1822 Q. Rev. 28 189 In the course of his ten years' lucubrations, he [sc. Champollion] has produced two Memoirs to prove, that neither the hieratic..nor the demotic..writing is alphabetic..but ideographic, like the pure hieroglyphics.

1823 New Monthly Mag. 9 17/1 The Egyptians made use, in this third system of writing, of a certain number of idiographic signs, which, throwing aside their real value, become accidentally signs of sounds or of real pronunciation.

1849 Fraser's Mag. 40 419 The principle..whether phonetic or ideagraphic.

1862 H. Spencer First Princ. ii. ii. §49. 164 The picture-writing of the Mexicans was found to have given birth to a like family of ideographic forms.

1870 F. W. Farrar Families of Speech iv. 164 Chinese has only some 450 sounds, and yet has upwards of 40,000 ideographic signs.

1948 D. Diringer Alphabet 174 An outside initiative has suggested the replacing of the Japanese ideographic~syllabic script by the Latin alphabet.

1964 M. A. K. Halliday et al. Ling. Sci. 49 The Chinese script is not ideographic: the symbols do not represent ideas, they represent formal items of the language.

1996 B. Shore Culture Mind iii. viii. 200 Idiographic writing systems employ abstract signs, but they are generally more empirically motivated than alphabetic systems.

2002 P. Baines & A. Haslam Type & Typogr. ii. 19/1 Ideographic systems are based on pictorial symbols that represent meanings, and thus have a semantic basis; whereas alphabetic systems are based on letterforms that represent units of speech and have a phonetic basis.

1837 Foreign Q. Rev. 18 143 The Chinese ideographic, even when employed phonetically..always represents the whole syllable and never a mere portion, or letter, like the Egyptian.

1848 C. H. Cottrell tr. C. C. J. Bunsen Egypt's Place I. 496 The Ideographics comprise all non-phonetic signs.

1881 A. J. Ellis Synops. Lect. London Dialectical Soc. 2 Nov. (O.E.D. Archive) Mimetics, ideographics, and ideophonetics. Fixed ideograph, variable ideophone, and their connection.

1891 E. M. Bliss Encycl. Missions I. 257/1 Combined Ideas, or ideographics, are characters made up of symbols so combined as to show their meaning or their influence upon each other.

1950 E. A.W. Budge Rosetta Stone (ed. 2) 60 Spolm and Seyffarth divided hieroglyphics into emphonics, symphonics and aphonics, by which terms they seem to imply phonetics, enclitics and ideographics.

1977 Diacritics 7 77 The text has an effect similar to the ideographics of Cixous's preface.

1997 P. Levinson Soft Edge (2001) x. 106 The stability accorded cultures by the advent of ideographics, the alphabet, and the printing press stimulated the successive rise of civilization in general.

1845 Lit. Gaz. 8 Mar. 156/2 Compare the gradual modification of the ideographic into the phonetic in Egypt.

1955 P. Heron Changing Forms Art 109 This long picture..was new: it represented, as far as Picasso is concerned, the defeat of the plastic by the ideographic.

1826 P. Du Ponceau in Trans. Amer. Philos. Soc. (1830) 3 70 From all these lights it seems to result, that a purely ideographical system of writing is a creature of the imagination, and cannot exist any where but for very limited purposes.

1842 W. T. Brande Dict. Sci., Lit. & Art 584/2 Ideographical writing is opposed to phonetic.

1934 H. Shih Chinese Renaissance iii. 50 I took the position that, while an alphabetized language might be the ultimate goal, it was necessary to consider intermediate steps to make the ideographical characters more teachable in the elementary schools.

2006 W. Zhang Heidegger, Rorty, & Eastern Thinkers iii. 59 An attempt to capture the essential meaning of the Sanskrit words in an ideographical writing system.

1822 T. Young in Misc. Wks. (1855) III. 229 Which is ideographically represented if his interpretation is right.

1836 P. S. Du Ponceau Diss. Nature & Char. Chinese Syst. Writing (1838) 48 Represent to yourself our hymn books..to be written ideographically, and to be sung ad libitum.

1880 A. H. Sayce in Nature 19 Feb. 379 There was a limit to the number of ideas which could be represented ideographically.

1920 E. Grant Orient in Bible Times v. 84 Now if we wished to write by these means the symbols of the plant called the mandrake, we might do so ideographically by drawing a picture of the plant.

1966 Jrnl. Biblical Lit. 85 330 The word ‘spindle’ is written ideographically here..rather than phonetically.

2003 B. Mou Compar. Approaches Chinese Philos. iv. 89 Various individual and particular changes reveal multiple patterns of regularity and directionality as the multiple hexagrams ideographically suggest.