i|con

i|con «Y kon», noun, plural i|cons, i|co|nes«Y kuh neez».

1. a picture or image of Christ, the Virgin Mary, or a saint, venerated as sacred in the Eastern Orthodox Church. Icons are usually painted on wood or ivory.

2. a picture; image; figure; statue.

3. a picture or drawing representing a command to a computer, as for example the picture of a garbage can representing the command to erase a file: »

When the user inserts a program disk into the computer, [there] appears on the computer's display screen…an icon, or sketch, of each program on the disk (Howard Bierman).

Also, ikon, eikon.

4. an admired or very celebrated figure: »

Duke Ellington, the jazz icon; a feminist icon; from industry leader to national icon.

5. a symbol or embodiment of something: »

The writer remains an icon of endless self-absorption; icons of a vanished demimonde.

╂[< Latin īcōn < Greek eik]