hieroglyphic

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The Word of the Day for April 3 is:

hieroglyphic   \hye-uh-ruh-GLIH-fik\   adjective
     1 : written in, constituting, or belonging to a system of 
writing mainly in pictorial characters
     2 : inscribed with hieroglyphic
    *3 : resembling hieroglyphic in difficulty of decipherment

Example sentence:
     Although they're notorious for hieroglyphic handwriting, 
physicians probably don't write any worse than other 
professionals.

Did you know?
     If Egyptian hieroglyphic writing is "all Greek to you," you 
know more about the etymology of "hieroglyphic" than you might 
think. That word comes from the Greek "hieroglyphikos," which 
means "sacred carving" (from "hieros," meaning "sacred," 
and "glyphein," meaning "to carve"). The ancient Greeks who 
named hieroglyphic writing reserved that term for the picture 
writing they found carved in temple walls or on public monuments 
in Egypt; it was distinguished from writings done in ink on 
papyrus or other smooth surfaces. But since making their first 
appearances in English in the 1580s, both the 
noun "hieroglyphics" and the adjective "hieroglyphic" have been 
extended to apply to the picture writing of various cultures, 
whether or not those writings were carved or sacred.


*Indicates the sense illustrated in the example sentence.