Mid 16th century (in the sense 'simile'): via Latin from Greek eikōn 'likeness, image'. Current senses date from the mid 19th century onwards.

• Greek eikōn, the source of icon, meant ‘likeness, image’. The earliest use in English was for a simile, a figure of speech in which two things are compared, as in ‘as white as snow’. Later it meant ‘a portrait, a picture’, and especially an illustration in a natural history book. The ‘portrait’ sense partly continues in the modern use for ‘a devotional painting of a holy figure’. The use to mean a celebrated figure such as a sporting or pop star dates from the early 1950s. Icons in computing, those symbols or graphic representations on VDU screens, appeared with the release of the Apple Macintosh computer in 1984. At various times in the history of the Christian Church, reformers, among them English Puritans in the 16th and 17th centuries, have condemned and destroyed religious images. Such a zealot is an iconoclast (mid 17th century), a breaker of images—the -clast bit is from Greek klan, ‘to break’. An iconoclast is now also a person who attacks a cherished belief or respected institution.