释义 |
iconic, a.|aɪˈkɒnɪk| Also eiconic. [ad. late L. īconic-us, ad. Gr. εἰκονικ-ός, f. εἰκών icon.] a. Of or pertaining to an icon, image, figure, or representation; of the nature of a portrait; spec. in Art, applied to the ancient portrait statues of victorious athletes commonly dedicated to divinities, and hence to memorial statues and busts executed according to a fixed or conventional type.
1656Blount Glossogr., Iconic, belonging to an Image, also lively pictured. 1801Fuseli in Lect. Paint. iii. (1848) 415 Iconic figures in metal began, says Pliny, to be the ornaments of every municipal forum. 1850J. Leitch tr. C.O. Müller's Anc. Art (ed. 2) §123 note, An iconic statue of Lysander in marble at Delphi. 1881E. W. Gosse in Fortn. Rev. June 703 In iconic sculpture the Royal Academy presents nothing so considerable as Mr. Boehm's..bust of Mr. Gladstone. 1882Athenæum 29 Apr. 543/2 Several heads appeared to be eiconic. b. Of or pertaining to an image used in worship.
1890Sat. Rev. 20 Sept. 348/1 Apparatus of the iconic character required by Roman Catholic devotion. c. Semiotics. Pertaining to or resembling an icon (sense 3 b). Also transf.
1939C. W. Morris in Kenyon Rev. I. iv. 415 The aesthetic sign..is an iconic sign (an ‘image’) in that it embodies these values in some medium where they may be directly inspected (in short, the aesthetic sign is an iconic sign whose designatum is a value). 1949[see icon 3 b]. 1956E. H. Hutten Lang. Mod. Physics ii. 15 Sometimes, the sign is similar to the thing it stands for, in the manner in which a picture represents, and we have iconic signs. 1964T. W. McRae Impact of Computers on Accounting v. 132 There are many kinds of model. The one described above is an iconic model, that is a physical representation of the original item. 1965C. H. Springer et al. Adv. Methods and Models i. 6 He might use..an iconic model, which doesn't act like the real thing (as the analog model does) but only looks like it. 1966M. Pei Gloss. Ling. Terminol. 118 Iconic, characterized by a symbolism which purports to present an image of the object described (Chinese pictographs). 1970English Studies LI. 279 Non-roman notations are generally ‘iconic’, i.e. ‘the symbols are not arbitrary signs, but in some way resemble what they stand for’. 1971Language XLVII. 416 There is..growing evidence that language contains many elements which are iconic—that is, imitative of non⁓linguistic reality.
▸ Designating a person or thing regarded as representative of a culture or movement; important or influential in a particular (cultural) context. Cf. icon n. Additions.
1976Newsweek 23 Feb. 59/3 His long-distance picture of Robert Smithson's iconic ‘Spiral Jetty’, with the artist seen as a speck walking along the top of an arch of his own work, is the finest example of its kind. 1986New Yorker (Nexis) 21 July 51/2 The scene was iconic, and as the rioting continued for a second night graffiti announcing the birth of a revolutionary movement appeared. 1998Independent 6 June i. 22/1 The conspiracy theories about the assassinations of John F Kennedy and the suicide of Marilyn Monroe all show how persistent this kind of speculation is when an iconic figure dies unexpectedly. 2002Empire Dec. 194/4 The opening scene of Ingmar Bergman's 1957 masterpiece is one of the most iconic images in cinema history. |