icon

[ahy-kon] /ˈaɪ kɒn/

noun

a picture, image, or other representation.

Eastern Church. a representation of some sacred personage, as Christ or a saint or angel, painted usually on a wood surface and venerated itself as sacred.

a sign or representation that stands for its object by virtue of a resemblance or analogy to it.

Computers. a picture or symbol that appears on a monitor and is used to represent a command, as a file drawer to represent filing.

Semiotics. a sign or representation that stands for its object by virtue of a resemblance or analogy to it.

Also, eikon, ikon (for defs 1, 2).

Origin

1565-75; < Latin < Greek eikṓn likeness, image, figure

Can be confused

icon, ikon.

Synonyms

2. See image.

Examples from the web for icon

He's a major icon of the early computer games industry.
The folder icon will be located on the bottom toolbar for articles and on the top toolbar for sections and blogs.
He had created an icon-a work that registers as an emotional and cultural reference point in the minds of millions.
And hardly a creature is stirring who isn't clutching that bright icon of the holiday season, the shopping bag.
It is designed to mimic the stone block pattern and preserve the general shape of the beloved national icon.
It was her rebellious nature that's made her such an icon.
Such sound processors will then be replaced by icon pods where by a sign languish is used for communication.
The structure they wished to suggest gave birth to an icon: the double helix.
Go behind the scenes at the home of a baseball icon.
Only after typing in a category name are you forcibly advanced to choose a color for that category and an icon.

British Dictionary definitions for icon

icon

/ˈaɪkɒn/

noun

Also ikon. a representation of Christ, the Virgin Mary, or a saint, esp one painted in oil on a wooden panel, depicted in a traditional Byzantine style and venerated in the Eastern Church

an image, picture, representation, etc

a person or thing regarded as a symbol of a belief, nation, community, or cultural movement

a person regarded as a sex symbol or as a symbol of the latest fashion trends

a pictorial representation of a facility available on a computer system, that enables the facility to be activated by means of a screen cursor rather than by a textual instruction

Word Origin

C16: from Latin, from Greek eikōn image, from eikenai to be like

Word Origin and History for icon

also ikon, 1570s, "image, figure, representation," from Late Latin icon, from Greek eikon "likeness, image, portrait," related to eikenai "be like, look like," of unknown origin. Eastern Church sense is attested from 1833. Computing sense first recorded 1982.

icon in Science

icon

(ī'kŏn')
In a graphical user interface, a picture on the screen that represents a specific file, directory, window, or program. Clicking on an icon will start the associated program or open the associated file, directory, or window.

icon in Culture

icon definition

An image used in worship in the Eastern Orthodox Church and among other Christians of similar traditions. Icons depict Jesus, Mary, and the saints, usually in a severe, symbolic, nonrealistic way.

icon in Technology

language
A descendant of SNOBOL4 with Pascal-like syntax, produced by Griswold in the 1970's. Icon is a general-purpose language with special features for string scanning. It has dynamic types: records, sets, lists, strings, tables. If has some object oriented features but no modules or exceptions. It has a primitive Unix interface.
The central theme of Icon is the generator: when an expression is evaluated it may be suspended and later resumed, producing a result sequence of values until it fails. Resumption takes place implicitly in two contexts: iteration which is syntactically loop-like ('every-do'), and goal-directed evaluation in which a conditional expression automatically attempts to produce at least one result. Expressions that fail are used in lieu of Booleans. Data backtracking is supported by a reversible assignment. Icon also has co-expressions, which can be explicitly resumed at any time.
Version 8.8 by Ralph Griswold includes an interpreter, a compiler (for some platforms) and a library (v8.8). Icon has been ported to Amiga, Atari, CMS, Macintosh, Macintosh/MPW, MS-DOS, MVS, OS/2, Unix, VMS, Acorn.
See also Ibpag2.
(ftp://cs.arizona.edu/icon/), MS-DOS FTP (ftp://bellcore.com norman/iconexe.zip).
Usenet newsgroup: news:comp.lang.icon.
E-mail: , .
Mailing list: icon-group@arizona.edu.
["The Icon Programmming Language", Ralph E. Griswold and Madge T. Griswold, Prentice Hall, seond edition, 1990].
["The Implementation of the Icon Programmming Language", Ralph E. Griswold and Madge T. Griswold, Princeton University Press 1986].
(1992-08-21)

graphics
A small picture intended to represent something (a file, directory, or action) in a graphical user interface. When an icon is clicked on, some action is performed such as opening a directory or aborting a file transfer.
Icons are usually stored as bitmap images. Microsoft Windows uses a special bitmap format with file name extension ".ico" as well as embedding icons in executable (".exe") and Dynamically Linked Library (DLL) files.
The term originates from Alan Kay's theory for designing interfaces which was primarily based on the work of Jerome Bruner. Bruner's second developmental stage, iconic, uses a system of representation that depends on visual or other sensory organization and upon the use of summarising images.
IEEE publication (https://ieee.org/organizations/history_center/cht_papers/Barnes.pdf).
[What MS tool can create .ico files?]
(2003-08-01)