Icono: A dictionary for a multipurpose international language based on icons

Icono is a new international language in which words are strings not of sounds or squiggles representing sounds, but of icons that directly hint at the words’ meaning. Here I present an initial English-Icono dictionary/thesaurus with more than 4,000 iconic words, discuss several of them in this article itself, show the iconic translation of the abstract of a peer-reviewed sociobiological review, and outline two ergonomic experiments for the dictionary’s further improvement. For easier learning, recognition, and recall, Icono links related words to one another. In English, for example, “eye”, “sight”, “vision”, and “perspective” look unrelated. In Icono, they all share an eye icon. As another example, “bitterness” combines the words for “taste” (a tongue sticking out of a mouth) and “poison” (a flask featuring a skull); “however” (which introduces a contrasting statement) combines “language” (a speech blurb) and “contrast” (a half-light, half-dark sun). I have previously argued that hieroglyphs evolved into letters to accommodate writers at the expense of readers. Yet, people typically read much more than they write, and—using modern technology—today’s icons can be written faster than their alphabetic equivalents can be spelled. So, it is time to rehabilitate the hieroglyph and introduce, at no cost to writers, a multipurpose international language that is easy to learn, read, and understand.