From the stop sign to the laugh-cry emoji, symbols play a critical and ubiquitous role in everyday life. A forthcoming exhibition at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, “Give Me a Sign: The ...

As the semanticist S.I. Hayakawa stressed in his classic book Language in Thought and Action, words are not the things they represent. Words are symbols. It’s the manipulation of those symbols that ...

Scholars have recently question whether ancient Indus inscriptions code for language. American and Indian scientists used statistics to show that the 4,500-year-old Indus symbols' pattern follows that ...

Give Me a Sign examines the fascinating histories behind many of the symbols that instruct, protect, entertain, empower and connect people. Marking the 50th anniversary of the Symbol Sourcebook, this ...

Alabama voters reversed themselves from a few years ago and removed racist vestiges of segregation from the state constitution that courts long ago ruled unconstitutional. Rhode Island did a similar a ...

At the very beginning of the “Symbol Sourcebook: An Authoritative Guide to International Graphic Symbols” (1972), the book’s author and one of the era’s most accomplished industrial designers, Henry ...

New research has shown that the symbols used by the ancient Picts, who lived in Scotland from AD 300-843, were an actual written language, rather than just symbology. What historians know of the Picts ...

Five states voted to cleanse the public sphere of words, phrases and symbols that to many were painful reminders of the nation’s history of slavery and the systematic oppression of Black people.

In this video, Ghana’s best-known contemporary artist, El Anatsui, speaks about the role that language and symbols play in his work. He describes how the abstract nature of West African “adinkra” ...

InvestigationThese yellow pictograms have proliferated and diversified to the point of becoming an indispensable part of our digital communication. Since the first limited set of yellow pictograms, ...