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 ...

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 ...

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” ...

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 ...

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 ...

The Coast Guard will remove divisive language from its new workplace harassment policy that downgraded the definition of swastikas and nooses from hate symbols to “potentially divisive,” Homeland ...

Language is central to all our lives and is arguably the cultural tool that sets humans apart from any other species. And on some accounts, language is the symbolic behaviour that allowed human ...

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, ...

The symbols we use also have names: dollar sign, treble clef, asterisk, etc. But sometimes the name for a symbol takes on a different sort of meaning, so that it is no longer a name, but a word in its ...