Ideogram

An ideogram is like a picture that stands for a word or an idea. You know how when you see a picture of a cat, you know that means "cat" even if you don't know how to read the word "cat"? That's kind of like how an ideogram works.

A long, long time ago, people didn't have written languages like we do now. They used pictures to communicate instead! They drew pictures of things like the sun, the moon, animals, and plants. Over time, people started to use these pictures to represent not just the thing they were drawing, but also ideas related to that thing. For example, a picture of the sun might represent the idea of "day."

As people's ideas and languages became more complex, they started to use these ideograms to make writing easier. Instead of having to draw a picture of a cat every time they wanted to write the word "cat," they could use an ideogram of a cat, which was much quicker and easier to write.

Nowadays, many languages still use ideograms alongside other types of writing. For example, you might have seen Chinese characters, which are a type of ideogram. The important thing to remember is that an ideogram is like a picture that means something else, and it's a way for people to communicate using pictures instead of just words.