A Chinese logogram
A logogram, or logograph, is a single written character which represents a word or a morpheme (a meaningful unit of language). This stands in contrast to other writing systems, such as syllabaries, abugidas, abjads, and alphabets, where each symbol primarily represents a sound or a combination of sounds.
In stenography, a logograph or logogram is a single character which represents a word.
Chinese characters, used in Chinese and Japanese, make up a logographic system. Written Korean used a subset of Chinese characters as well until widespread use of Hangul after World War II, as did Vietnamese before French missionaries arrived in Indochina. Other logographic systems are Egyptian hieroglyphs, cuneiform, and Mayan glyphs. (See the list of writing systems.)
In all modern writing systems, the numerals and mathematical symbols are logograms — 1 stands for one, 2 for two, + for plus, and so on. In English, the ampersand & is used for and and et (such as &c for et cetera), % for percent, $ for dollar, # for both number and pound, etc.
However, no writing system is purely logographic. All full logographic systems include a phonetic dimension (such as the "a" in the logogram @ at), and this is usually syllabic. In some cases, such as cuneiform as it was used for Akkadian, the vast majority of glyphs are used for their sound values rather than logographically. Indeed, this is how Japanese kana developed. Many logographic systems also have an ideographic component, called "determiners" in the case of Egyptian and "radicals" in the case of Chinese. Typical Egyptian usage is to augment a logogram, which may potentially represent several words with different pronuncations, with a determiner to narrow down the meaning, and a phonetic component to specify the pronunciation. In the case of Chinese, the vast majority of characters are a combination of a radical that indicates its semantic category, plus a phonetic to give an idea of the pronunciation, although this has become somewhat opaque over the last three millennia. In Japanese, each borrowed Chinese character may have several pronunciations, which are often disambiguated by writing their grammatical inflections phonetically. The Mayan system used logograms with phonetic complements like the Egyptian, but lacked ideograms.
Compared to alphabetical systems, logographies have the disadvantage of one needing to learn and remember many more glyphs. An advantage is that one does not necessarily need to know the language of the writer to understand them — everyone understands what 1 means, whether they call it one, eins, uno or ichi. Likewise, people speaking different Chinese dialects may not understand each other in speaking, but can to some extent in writing, even if they don't write standard written Chinese. In addition, a logogram-based system uses fewer characters to express something than an alphabetic system, which is useful for newspaper headlines, and a benefit enjoyed by Chinese and to some extent Japanese users of mobile phone web browsers and other devices which display information on a small screen. Many people also believe that once learned, logographies can be read more quickly than alphabets.
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