Scroll down for the search. For a list of all glyphs, hit one of the 'Search' buttons without entering anything.

Glyph search

Shown below are the simple glyphs glossed in a standard fashion. Any other words are created by joining these glyphs together along joining faces. Joining faces are indicated as running alongside the dashed lines. These dashed lines are not drawn in writing.

Search by text

You can search meaning, etymology, notes, etc., by typing your search term into the text box below. The search looks for each word as a substring of one of the fields, and will display a glyph if it finds a match for all of your search terms. So, the search results all match all of your search terms, and you're searching everything to do with each glyph at once. The search is not case-sensitive.

Search by type, shape and/or stroke count.

Type may be one of

• Noun: the usual kind of glyph that expresses a concept, can be treated as a noun/adjective/adverb, is bound to, etc. Only 'simple' nouns are listed here, that is, nouns that are not made up of other nouns snapped to each other.
• Relation: decorations that may be put on a line to indicate what relation that line is.
• Grammar: various grammar elements.
• Device: there are several devices that are used in many glyphs. These devices are purely glyph-building and have no meaning in writing.

Shape is one of

• I: 1 joining face.
• V: 2 adjoining joining faces.
• H: 2 opposing joining faces.
• U: 3 joining faces.
• O: 4 joining faces.

The shapes are given letters that graphically represent them. Only nouns can be searched by shape: if you want to search relations or grammar, leave shape set to 'all'.

Stroke count may be any positive integer. It is defined as the number of individual strokes in a glyph, excluding joining faces. The boundary of a stroke is any sharp edge.

A word on etymology

Extremely common processes during glyphification include bifurcating an image (such that the glyph depicts half of the image), squaring (such that a rounded image becomes angular) and stylisation. These will not be explicitly mentioned in the etymologies given.

These etymologies are mostly pictorial, or pictorial + rebus (phonetic borrowing). A few take after glyphs in Toki Pona, UNLWS and Blissymbolics. Some are geometric primitives, meaning that they have no particular etymology.