iconomatic
UK/ʌɪkɒnəˈmatɪk/
iconomatic adjective: the use of pictographs to represent their sounds, as in English rebuses using an eye to mean I or in Chinese phonetic transcription of foreign terms into characters.
Adjective
iconomatic (not comparable)
- The use of pictographs to represent their sounds, as in English rebuses using an eye to mean I or in Chinese phonetic transcription of foreign terms into characters.
- We have, so far as I am aware, no scientific term to express this manner of phonetic writing, and I propose for it therefore the adjective ikonomatic...1886, Daniel Garrison Brinton, Essays of an Americanist, pages 207–8
- Iconomatic writing... occupies an intermediate position, standing in some sense in relation to both letter and picture writing.1887 January 22, "Iconomatic Writing", Scientific American, Vol. 56, No. 4, p. 56
Forms of iconomatic
| alternative form | ikonomatic |
|---|
Origin of iconomatic
A clipping of earlier icononomatic, from a modern combination of Ancient Greek εἰκών (eikṓn, “icon, image, likeness”) + ὄνομα (ónoma, “name”) + -ικός (-ikós, “-ic: forming adjectives”).
Words formed from iconomatic
- iconomatically
- iconomaticism
- iconomatography
Questions about iconomatic
- What does iconomatic mean?
- Iconomatic means the use of pictographs to represent their sounds, as in English rebuses using an eye to mean I or in Chinese phonetic transcription of foreign terms into characters.
- What part of speech is iconomatic?
- Iconomatic is an adjective.
- How do you pronounce iconomatic?
- Iconomatic is pronounced /ʌɪkɒnəˈmatɪk/ (UK).
Words near iconomatic in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: iconomatic (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.
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Cite this entry: “iconomatic.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/iconomatic. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.