icon
Pluralicons
- 1A small graphic symbol on a screen that represents a program, file, or function.
She clicked the printer icon to send the document.
The desktop was cluttered with dozens of icons.
Similarsymbol
Note
The computing sense is young, first recorded in 1982, and it is the thing you click. It usually takes a noun in front that names the picture or its job: the loudspeaker icon, the printer icon. Rows of them can sit together in an icon bar. Plain "symbol" or "button" may name the same spot on a screen, but icon stresses that it is a little picture.
- 2A person or thing regarded as the finest or most representative example of a particular profession or pursuit.
He remains an icon of jazz piano decades after his death.
The building grew into a national icon of modern architecture.
Similarexample, model, epitome, embodiment, symbol
Note
The figurative step from the shrine to public life: someone or something held up as the symbol of a whole field. Robert Palmer, writing on rock in 1981, called such icons "larger-than-life symbolic figures" whose fortunes mirror the music's own. The usual frames are an icon of something (an icon of American culture) or an icon in a field (an icon in the business), and the word carries admiration.
- 3An image, symbol, portrait, or other representation venerated as an object of religious devotion.
Pilgrims knelt before the gilded icon for hours.
The family kept a small icon on the wall for daily prayer.
Similaridol
Note
The oldest sense, and the one the word's history explains: Latin īcōn, from Greek eikṓn, "likeness, image, portrait". What makes something an icon here is the devotion around it, not the medium, so a symbol or carved figure qualifies as well as a painting. Idol can sometimes stand in for it. Graven image is a hostile label, used to disparage such veneration rather than describe it.
- 4A painted religious image, frequently on wood panels, whose subject is a saint or an event from Scripture.
The monastery's oldest icon depicts the Nativity.
Restorers carefully cleaned the cracked surface of the icon.
Note
Here the word narrows to a particular art of Eastern Christianity: a painted saint or Scripture scene, often on a wooden panel. English has used icon for this Orthodox tradition since 1833. Where the general devotional image can be any venerated object, this sense names the painting itself. It is the one in The New York Times in 1986, when a "Weeping Virgin" icon drew crowds in Chicago.
- 5A small image used to represent a user online, such as an avatar or profile picture.
He updated his icon after the holidays.
Her forum icon is a cartoon cat.
Similaravatar
Note
The screen symbol turned personal: the picture that stands for you rather than for a program. It belongs to informal online talk and is usually possessive, as in my icon or your icon. It is something a person picks, changes or borrows (use your drawing as my icon). Avatar and profile picture name the same thing, and icon is the casual word among them.
- 6A sign, word, or character whose form resembles and is shaped by the thing it stands for, as onomatopoeic words are.
In Peirce's framework, a portrait functions as an icon of the person it depicts.
Onomatopoeic words like "splash" count as icons because their sound mirrors their meaning.
Note
In semiotics the word returns to the "likeness" at its root. An icon is a sign that resembles what it stands for, unlike a sign tied to its meaning only by convention. Onomatopoeia is the clearest case in language, since a word like splash imitates the sound it names. When choosing between terms, call a sign an icon only when its form is shaped by its referent, not merely agreed upon.
Practice
Can you tell the meanings of icon apart? Answer 3 quick questions from this page, or write your own sentence and AI will check it.
Origin
From Latin "icon," from Ancient Greek "eikon" ("likeness, image, portrait"). The Eastern Orthodox Church sense is attested from 1833, and the computing sense was first recorded in 1982.