logogram
/ˈlɒɡəɡræm/noun
Written symbol representing a word or morpheme
From Greek, ultimately Proto-Indo-European logo- (word).
Lineage
logo-
-gram
The story
Picture an ancient Greek speaker carefully “picking out” words: that image lies behind λόγος (lógos), the ancestor of logo-, because its deeper Indo-European root *leg- meant “collect” or “gather.” The second half comes from γράφω (gráphō), originally the very physical act of scratching a mark into a surface; its descendant γράμμα became a written character or document. Put the two together and a logogram is, almost literally, a “word-mark.” The English noun appeared in 1840, although an earlier use from 1820 was tangled with logograph and even with logogriph, an old word puzzle—a small reminder that dictionaries have their own history of mistaken identity. Chinese characters, Egyptian hieroglyphs, and many cuneiform signs fit the idea, though real writing systems usually mix meaning-signs with sound clues: even ancient scribes needed a little phonetic backup.