Nuts and Bolts: logograph/logogram.

 A logograph or logogram is a symbol which represents a chunk of a word, or a whole word or even a series of words.

They're most used in Eastern languages (Chinese, for example) but we in the West have a few: %, for example, means per cent, and 4 means four. Some Western shorthand systems use logograms, too, especially for common words.

The very first writing systems, such as cuneiform and heiroglyphs, tend to have logographic elements.

You may think that using arbitrary symbols to represent words is horribly complicated and impractical system, and you'd be right, and so all logographic systems have some kind of phonetic component. The same symbol might be used for syllables with the same consonants (pet and pit, for example), or you might have a symbol put in to turn a hat symbol into into a chat symbol. You might have a symbol which means domestic animal, and then add extra clues as to which kind of domestic animal it is.

You can have logograms which are pictures of the thing they represent; you can have logograms which represent ideas (we in the West can use an arrow to mean up, for instance); you can combine ideas, so you might have a symbol for a person and a symbol for hill and have it mean tiredness; or you could have a symbol for the sound RING and add something to tell you whether it's a telephone or a wedding ring.

But it's not as simple as that, because there are many symbols that have changed their meaning over the centuries, in the same way that in English the word lord has a common root with the word loaf.

Pahlavi script was a really odd example. It was a phonetic alphabet, but the words were written phonetically in Aramaic but what you said out loud was the word of the same meaning in Persian. It was like having to write the English word window fenêtre.

It's all wonderful and fascinating, and if there were time and energy then I'd learn a logographic language.

For now, though, I'm just going to stop complaining about English spelling.

Word To Use Today: logogram. The Greek logos means word or speech, and the Greek gramma means letter.