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The Collaborative International Dictionary
Hieroglyph

Hieroglyph \Hi"er*o*glyph\, Hieroglyphic \Hi`er*o*glyph"ic\, n.

  1. A sacred character; a character used in picture writing, as of the ancient Egyptians, Mexicans, etc. Specifically, in the plural, the picture writing of the ancient Egyptian priests. It is made up of three, or, as some say, four classes of characters: first, the hieroglyphic proper, or figurative, in which the representation of the object conveys the idea of the object itself; second, the ideographic, consisting of symbols representing ideas, not sounds, as an ostrich feather is a symbol of truth; third, the phonetic, consisting of symbols employed as syllables of a word, or as letters of the alphabet, having a certain sound, as a hawk represented the vowel a.

  2. Any character or figure which has, or is supposed to have, a hidden or mysterious significance; hence, any unintelligible or illegible character or mark. [Colloq.]

Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
hieroglyph

1590s, shortening of hieroglyphic (n.), 1590s; see hieroglyphic.

Wiktionary
hieroglyph

n. An element of an ideographic (hieroglyphic) writing system.

WordNet
hieroglyph
  1. n. writing that resembles hieroglyphics (usually by being illegible) [syn: hieroglyphic]

  2. a writing system using picture symbols; used in ancient Egypt [syn: hieroglyphic]

Wikipedia
Hieroglyph

A hieroglyph ( Greek for " sacred writing") is a character of the ancient Egyptian writing system. Logographic scripts that are pictographic in form in a way reminiscent of ancient Egyptian are also sometimes called hieroglyphs". In Neoplatonism, especially during the Renaissance, a "hieroglyph" was an artistic representation of an esoteric idea, which Neoplatonists believed actual Egyptian hieroglyphs to be. The word hieroglyphics refer to a hieroglyphic script.

Hieroglyph (disambiguation)

Hieroglyph or hieroglyphics may mean:

  • Egyptian hieroglyphs or any of several other superficially pictographic scripts. These include:
* Anatolian hieroglyphs
* Cretan hieroglyphs
* Hieroglyphic Luwian
* Indus script
* Mayan hieroglyphs
* Mi'kmaq hieroglyphs
* Olmec hieroglyphs
  • Hieroglyph (TV series), a cancelled American action-adventure drama series to air on Fox
  • Hieroglyphics: The Writings of Ancient Egypt, a textbook
  • Hieroglyphics (group), an American hip-hop collective
Hieroglyph (TV series)

Hieroglyph was a proposed American action-adventure drama series created by Travis Beacham, who served as executive producer on the show along with Katherine Pope, Peter Chernin and Miguel Sapochnik. Sapochnik directed the first episode. The series was produced by 20th Century Fox Television and Chernin Entertainment. Originally scheduled for a spring 2015 premiere, it was announced at the end of June 2014 that Fox had shut down production and canceled the series before airing an episode.

Usage examples of "hieroglyph".

He moved to Cairo as a young man and learned the European tongues in order to be able to support himself by working as a dragoman, while quietly launching his study of hieroglyphs between backstairs assignations with tourists.

Egyptologist was focused entirely on that extremely brief period when the young Menelik had worked as a dragoman one winter in Cairo, in order to support himself while beginning his study of hieroglyphs.

As soon as she had finished the robe, I told her to make a crown of parchment with seven long points, on which I painted some fearful figures and hieroglyphs.

But I have seen pictures in books of Egyptian hieroglyphs, and I should like very much to see hieratic writing someday, and to know how it is different.

American hieroglyphs peculiar signs which take the place of pictures, and which probably, like the hieratic symbols mingled with the hieroglyphics of Egypt, represent alphabetical sounds.

His daughter, it was said, had been taken to the land of Home after Kismet proved to have a greater knowledge of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs than her father.

My dreams welled up into the waking world, so that each sand-embedded megalith seemed part of endless rooms and corridors of pre-human masonry, carved and hieroglyphed with symbols that I knew too well from years of custom as a captive mind of the Great Race.

The Mugwump sidles around the boy goosing him and caressing his genitals in hieroglyphs of mockery.

His treatise on the Egyptian hieroglyphs was mentioned by both Michael Psellos and John Tzetzes, but it has not been seen sincenot since the sack of Constantinople.

The dense, unvisited woods on those inaccessible slopes seemed to harbour alien and incredible things, and I felt that the very outline of the hills themselves held some strange and aeon-forgotten meaning, as if they were vast hieroglyphs left by a rumoured titan race whose glories live only in rare, deep dreams.

He gave the impression of residing permanently in a special paradise of transcendental and transfinite numbers and of the hieroglyphs of symbolic logic, for whose manipulations he had a nationally recognized fame among mathematicians.

The lines and circles of the hieroglyphs spelling unfound grew clearer.

The couple had been with her for almost six years, and yet Karl was a mask--- a talking, breathing, untranslated hieroglyph running her errands on stilted legs.

He did not even mind the hellish, octopus-headed bulk of great Tulu, fashioned of unknown metal and leering with fishy, sea-green eyes, which squatted in the blackness above him on its monstrously hieroglyphed pedestal.

The masts themselves were minutely carved with odd runes and hieroglyphs.