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The ideographic representation of a child beneath a roof, which once had the meaning of "to care for", has since changed over the years to a deflective meaning of "character" or - more from the point of view of the ideograph - as simply, "ideogram."
Ideograms (from Greek ιδεα idea "idea" + γραφω grapho "to write") are symbols that represent words in a written language, as opposed to using symbols to represent phonemes or syllables so as to construct words from their component sounds.
Early hieroglyphics and cuneiform were ideograms, though later they were used extensively (and in cuneiform, exclusively) for their pronunciation. In fact Egyptian heiroglyphs, in their most developed stage, represented a merger of ideograms and phonograms which later became the key to its recovery. See Rosetta Stone.
Japanese ideograms, or Kanji, are mostly Chinese characters, sometimes altered in shape, or native characters made to resemble Chinese characters. (The characters of Japanese origin are called 国字, or kokuji). From their introduction in the 4th century until the 8th century, Chinese characters were used for phonetic writing, but this is no longer the case. Instead, Japanese developed two scripts for use in phonetic writing - katakana, and its sister syllabary, hiragana, both derived from simplifications of Kanji with the sounds that they represent.
Chinese characters, although usually classified as ideograms or logograms, are more alphabet-like than most people think. Most characters (some 90 percent it is estimated) consist of multiple elements, where one part indicates the pronunciation of the character, and another is connected with the meaning. For this reason, these can be called phonologograms. In addition, just as the word logogram has an English meaning different and larger than a mere sum of its Greek components meaning idea and write, so do Chinese words have meaning different from a mere combination of their constituent characters. Some even argue that the basic unit in Chinese is not characters but many-word phrases.
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Related terms
An ideogram is distinguished from a pictograph in that a pictograph is any symbol that represents an idea, whereas an ideogram is part of an established written language. Since ideograms represent words or morphemes rather than ideas directly, some linguists prefer the terms logogram and logographic to avoid confusion.
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