How to Use pictogram in a Sentence

pictogram

noun
  • The first is a pictogram of James on the court with the Sixers' starters.
    — Joey Morona, cleveland.com, 1 Mar. 2018
  • Each card has a point value and a pictogram that tells you which tiles on the board the card affects relative to its position.
    — Ash Parrish, The Verge, 26 Feb. 2024
  • The pictogram people were great, the drones were weird, but in total there was very little coherence to the whole program.
    — Jackson McHenry and Kathryn Vanarendonk, Vulture, 23 July 2021
  • One pictogram highlighted in the study depicts soldiers drowning as a building burns in the background.
    — Isis Davis-Marks, Smithsonian Magazine, 31 Aug. 2021
  • That means letters on signs must be a certain size, signs must be mounted at a specific height from the ground, letters and pictograms must contrast with their background and so on.
    — Emily Matchar, Smithsonian, 22 Dec. 2017
  • Florida’s road signs are based on international standards that, for the most part, rely on pictograms and colors to convey their messages.
    — Orlando Sentinel Editorial Board, The Orlando Sentinel, 4 Feb. 2026
  • That’s why the pictogram—a symbol standing in for a word or phrase—is a common tool for helping people with intellectual disabilities.
    — Eleanor Cummins, Popular Science, 2 Mar. 2021
  • Its depiction as a pictogram — resembling a crimson upside-down pear — likely dates back to the medieval era, if not classical antiquity.
    — Los Angeles Times, 21 Oct. 2020
  • The characters do sometimes speak, but in a language of pictograms—images of images that, in Zsako’s hands, convey emotions more efficiently than most text.
    — Jessica Winter, The New Yorker, 16 Dec. 2023
  • So the Sumerians would repurpose an existing pictogram that had resonance with the hard-to-illustrate concept.
    — Maura Judkis, Washington Post, 1 Oct. 2019
  • The experts gave suggestions for making the directions easier to follow, including fitting them on a single panel and adding pictograms.
    — Will Sullivan, Smithsonian Magazine, 17 Feb. 2023
  • The pictogram is a clever cross between two digital Unicode signs — the arcs denoting slumber, the slash designating confusion.
    — Christopher Knight, Los Angeles Times, 10 Mar. 2023
  • The agency proposed marking temples, for the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games, with a more generic pictogram of a pagoda.
    — Anne Quito, Quartz, 24 Dec. 2019
  • The back label features pictograms showing the topography and viticultural practices.
    — Lana Bortolot, Forbes, 23 Feb. 2023
  • Before this week, the images the show proffered felt comfortingly anachronistic, with the pilgrim-like costumes and pictogram-only supermarkets.
    — Sophie Gilbert, The Atlantic, 20 June 2018
  • Cuneiform, their early system of writing, began as a series of pictograms, and some characters represented multiple words or concepts.
    — Maura Judkis, Washington Post, 1 Oct. 2019
  • Emojis, colorful and playful pictograms that are available on a range of devices, have altered the way humans communicate with one other and have become a powerful force in pop culture, both online and off.
    — Liam Stack, New York Times, 6 Oct. 2017
  • Akkadian was written in cuneiform, a system invented by the Sumerians that involves engraving pictograms and symbols into clay with a reed stylus.
    — Sonja Anderson, Smithsonian Magazine, 1 Aug. 2024
  • The Unicode Consortium, though, is more popularly known as the body that approves the emojis that go on to shape human communication, one glistening pictogram at a time.
    — Megan Garber, The Atlantic, 21 Oct. 2017
  • That thought may or may not have factored into Elon Musk’s decision to have Twitter deploy the pictogram in response to all messages sent to the company’s media relations email address.
    — David Meyer, Fortune, 20 Mar. 2023
  • Once Sussman / Prejza came aboard, these ideas would be refined and repeated in signs, badges, pictograms, uniforms, merchandise, and event interiors with a more precise hierarchy of type, symbol, and color.
    — Alexandra Lange, Curbed, 17 May 2018
  • Players from both sides had pictograms of different disabilities on their jerseys instead of their names as part of a disability awareness campaign aimed at providing better facilities in soccer stadiums for those with disabilities.
    — ABC News, 21 Mar. 2026
  • Given display limitations in early Japanese smart phone screens, Kurita decided to develop pictograms to make displaying information more effective.
    — Vyvyan Evans, CNN, 29 May 2017
  • Composed of pictograms, the Azcatitlán’s 25 folios feature a succession of Aztec rulers, and dramatize the arrival of Hernán Cortés and Christianity.
    — Brittany Allen, Literary Hub, 8 Jan. 2026
  • Nevertheless, Kurita’s pictograms bear little resemblance to modern emojis and were more akin to the Macintosh pictograms created by Susan Kare in 1984.
    — Molly Peck, USA TODAY, 30 July 2024

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'pictogram.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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