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A hieroglyph is a picture-sign used as writing. The most famous ones are from ancient Egypt: a bird, an eye, a reed, standing for a sound, a word, or part of a word. One sign is a hieroglyph; many signs together make a text. Though actually, teachers and museums also use the word for similar picture-writing in other old cultures, not only Egypt. In loose talk, people sometimes call any hard, mysterious writing 'hieroglyphs,' even messy handwriting — that is a stretch, a little joke, not the careful meaning. You will meet the word in history class, museums, and documentaries. It is almost always a noun.
象形文字（一個符號）；埃及聖書體的字
組成A back-formation from hieroglyphic, the older word, first attested around 1598. By pieces: hiero- (sacred, holy) + glyph (a carved mark). From Middle French hiéroglyphique, from Late Latin hieroglyphicus, from Ancient Greek hierogluphikós, from hierós 'sacred' + gluphḗ 'carved work.' The Greeks were naming Egyptian writing, which Egyptian itself called 'the god's word.'
同家族的字
- hieroglyphicthe older adjective/noun this was cut back from
- hieroglyphicsthe usual name for the writing system as a whole
- glyphshares glyph: a carved or written sign
原始詞典資料4 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法，原文照列，我們還沒有寫成教學內容。上面的說明才是我們自己寫的；有些用法可能上面已經講過了。
hieroglyphnoun/ˈhaɪ.ɹəˌɡlɪf/
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An element (individual sign or glyph) of a hieroglyphic writing system.
- Hieroglyphs were discovered on the wall inside the temple.
- Mayan Hieroglyphs as Linguistic Evidence. In Third Palenque Round Table, 1978, vol. V, part 2, edited by Merle Greene Robertson, pp. 204-216.
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An element (individual sign or glyph) of a hieroglyphic writing system.
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informalAny obscure or baffling symbol.
- With your handwriting, it's no surprise the Prof can't read your hieroglyphs!
- "There are SCPs with antimemetic properties," Marion goes on. "There are ideas which cannot be spread. There are entities and phenomena which harvest and consume information, particularly information about themselves. You take a Polaroid photo of one, it'll never develop. You write a description down with a pen on paper and hand it to someone— but what you've written turns out to be hieroglyphs, and nobody can understand them, not even you. You can look directly at one and it won't even be invisible, but you'll still perceive nothing there."
hieroglyphverb/ˈhaɪ.ɹəˌɡlɪf/
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To represent by hieroglyphs.
資料來源：英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary（CC BY-SA 4.0）。 原文照列，未經改寫。