Noun: hieroglyphic
| Singular | hieroglyphic |
| Plural | hieroglyphics |
Sample Sentences
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I must say, that, at the coronation, there was little vestige left as possible "of the charms that pleased a king." "She looked," Lady Mary Wortley said, "like an Egyptian mummy, wrought with hieroglyphics of gold." [1837, L[etitia] E[lizabeth] L[andon], “Gaieties and Absurdities. Lady Marchmont to Sir Jasper Meredith.”, in Ethel Churchill: Or, The Two Brides. […], volume II, London: Henry Colburn, […], →OCLC, page 44:]
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The hieroglyphics or symbols, however, were reversed, just as though they had been pressed on wax. [1886 October – 1887 January, H[enry] Rider Haggard, She: A History of Adventure, London: Longmans, Green, and Co., published 1887, →OCLC:]
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Above all, the 48-page timetables of the new service, which have been distributed free at every station in the scheme, are a model to the rest of B.R. For the first time on British Railways, so far as we are aware, a substantial timetable has been produced, not only without a single footnote but also devoid of all wearisome asterisks, stars, letter suffixes and other hieroglyphics. [1960 December, “The Glasgow Suburban Electrification is opened”, in Trains Illustrated, page 714:]
Nouns inflected like hieroglyphic
soldier's woundwort,
Nicosian,
whopper,
greypate,
tactile sign language,
chronotrope,
Rosie Lee,
dissentient,
photoinactivator,
sulphonediimine,
coastal waterfall,
residuary devise,
bituminization,
nitrosonaphthol,
smṛiti,
geosphere,
backscreen,
mensuralist,
flocculate,
flocculant, etc. (List truncated at 20 nouns)
Etymology
First coined 1726, from French hiéroglyphique, from Latin hieroglyphicus, from Ancient Greek ἱερογλυφικός (hierogluphikós), from ἱερογλυφέω (hierogluphéō, “to represent hieroglyphically”), from ἱερός (hierós, “sacred, holy”) + γλύφω (glúphō, “to carve, to engrave, to cut out”). By surface analysis, hiero- + glyphic. See: French Nouns '
hiéroglyphique', Latin Nouns '
hieroglyphicus'.