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A logogram, or logograph, is a grapheme which represents a word or a morpheme (the smallest meaningful unit of language). This stands in contrast to phonograms, which represent phonemes (speech sounds) or combinations of phonemes, and determinatives, which mark semantic categories.
Logograms are commonly known also as "ideograms" or "hieroglyphs". Strictly speaking, however, ideograms represent ideas directly rather than words and morphemes, and none of the logographic systems described here are truly ideographic.
Since logograms are visual symbols representing words rather than the sou...