A symbol is an object, design, property, text, or other marker representing something other than itself, often an abstract idea or set of relationships. According to Charles Sanders Peirce’s definition of semiotics, a symbol is a sign without any connection to what it represents.
Unlike other forms of signs, which may look, sound, smell, feel, or taste like what they represent, symbols are arbitrary and stand for what they represent solely by convention. Therefore, unlike other forms of signs, symbols necessitate agreement amongst a community of interpreters in order to have meaning.
Symbols can be signs invented for the purpose of representation (language), or existing objects that have had symbolic properties conferred upon them (the designation of the lily as a symbol of purity in Christian iconography). In more general usage, however, the relationship between the symbol and the object or idea it represents is not always as purely arbitrary as Peircean semiotics suggests. Indeed, the terms sign, icon, and symbol are often used interchangeably to denote any marker that evokes another object or idea, whether arbitrarily or by means of resemblance, metaphor, or association. For example, objects can take on symbolic meaning because of their material characteristics: a snail might be used as a symbol of slowness in general.
Likewise, the fleur-delis symbol represents a type of lily not because of an arbitrary designation, but because it works as a pictogram, a visual representation, however highly stylized, of the shape of the flower’s petals. Many user interface designs employ pictogram symbols (called “icons” in this context) to represent a device’s functions by means of analogy or metaphor.
Style can also become symbolic because of its historical or cultural associations. A chair in the neo-Gothic style might evoke ecclesiastical functions, whereas a Bauhaus-style chair might be used by an interior designer as a symbol of corporate efficiency. Even if a symbol is not arbitrary, its meaning is largely defined by a community of interpreters; it can have different meanings, or no meaning at all, to people in different places or in different eras.
Symbols can also evoke other symbols, thus representing by forming a chain of associations. For example, the fleur-de-lis symbol, having been chosen by the French king Clovis I as a sign of his purification through baptism, comes to symbolize the entire French monarchy, and, by extension, both France itself as well as the concept of royalty. The same graphic mark can have a host of other symbolic meanings depending on the community of interpreters. The same fleur-de-lis symbol can represent Scouting organizations, for example, based on a set of symbolic associations quite independent of its history as a representation of France or of royalty. Designers have often turned to the symbol to be the basis of a universally comprehensible representational system. For example, Otto Neurath developed a set of stylized pictograms called isotypes as a way of describing facts more precisely than possible with the arbitrary codes of verbal language.
A graphic symbol that represents an idea rather than a word can also be called an ideogram. Many designers have aspired to develop universally legible symbols, signs whose comprehension is not dependent upon a community of interpreters, but is rather grounded in common experience. Most symbol systems do, however, ultimately require familiarity with particular visual conventions to be understood. The symbol can also be used to describe an approach to design modeling. As differentiated from iconic modeling, which uses representations that share characteristics proportions, shape, and so on of the objects or procedures represented, and analogue modeling, which represents certain characteristics of the object or process with equivalent terms or qualities, symbolic modeling represents the object or process wholly abstractly, for example though a series of mathematical equations.
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