1. of, relating to, or expressed by an ideograph; representing ideas or things directly rather than sounds or words
Usage: linguistics; writing systems

Examples

• Chinese characters are ideographic symbols that represent whole words or concepts.
• The ideographic writing system of Japanese kanji differs from the phonetic hiragana script.
• Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics were partly ideographic, combining picture symbols with phonetic elements.
• Ideographic scripts can be challenging for learners because each symbol must be memorized individually.
• The ideographic nature of emoji makes them useful for cross-language communication.