Icon

How to spell icon

4 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce icon

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does icon mean?

1. nounA person or thing widely admired and seen as a representative symbol of something.
2. nounA small graphic symbol on a screen that represents a program, file, or function.
3. nounA sacred painting of Christ or a saint, especially in the Eastern Orthodox tradition.

Icon in a sentence

• The singer became a cultural icon after her debut album.

• Double-click the icon to open the spreadsheet.

• The monastery displayed a gilded icon above the altar.

• That red sports car is a design icon of the 1960s.

• She dragged the folder icon into the trash.

• Visitors lit candles before the ancient icon.

Where does icon come from?

Language of origin: Greek

The word comes from the Greek eikon, which literally meant a 'likeness', 'image' or 'portrait'. It passed into Latin as icon, keeping the sense of a figure or representation, and English adopted it in the late 1500s to describe a picture or image, especially a painted one. In Eastern Orthodox Christianity the term settled onto the sacred panel paintings of Christ and the saints, a use that still survives today. The figurative meaning, a person or thing held up as a representative symbol of something, grew in the twentieth century, and the computing sense of a small on-screen picture arrived with graphical interfaces in the 1980s. An older spelling 'ikon' reflects the Greek kappa directly, which is exactly why some writers still hesitate over the c, but standard modern English keeps the c throughout.

How the word is built

• icon (from Greek eikon: likeness, image), an unanalysed single root noun in English