Logos

How to spell logos

5 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce logos

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does logos mean?

1. nounMore than one logo; the printed or designed symbols that represent companies or brands.

Logos in a sentence

• The agency redesigned all of the client logos for the rebrand.

• Sponsor logos were printed across the back of the race jersey.

Where does logos come from?

Language of origin: Greek

This word comes straight from the ancient Greek logos, which literally meant 'word', but also carried the wider senses of 'speech', 'account', 'reason' and 'ratio'. It was built on the verb legein, meaning 'to say' or 'to gather', and it became one of the great load-bearing terms of Greek thought: philosophers used it for the rational principle ordering the universe, and early Christian writers later adopted it to mean the divine Word. The same root quietly underlies a huge family of English words, since the ending '-logy' in biology, geology and psychology all descends from logos, marking a 'study' or 'discourse'. In its modern commercial sense, 'logo' is a twentieth-century shortening of 'logogram' or 'logotype', a single symbol standing for a name, and its plural simply adds an 's' to give 'logos'. Because the two uses look identical on the page, an adult writing the everyday plural of 'logo' sometimes hesitates over whether anything more elaborate is needed.

How the word is built

• log- (from Greek logos: word, reason, account)
• -os; the branding sense is logo
• plural -s