rebus

The effect of these lines, which reach back into the past while projecting far into the future, is that of a rebus, with the stunning phrase “the final whereabouts” offering one more breath of indirection.

From Los Angeles Times ● Sep. 22, 2022

Slogans, drawings, GIFs, inspirational sentiments, little rebus puzzles—it’s really up to you.

From Slate ● Feb. 5, 2018

Follow Plautus’s famous injunction: modus omnibus in rebus.

From New York Times ● Apr. 8, 2016

Mrs. Gordon was credited with pioneering and popularizing the use of the rebus, in which a character represents a word or part of a word.

From Washington Post ● Jan. 31, 2015

Logograms for abstract words were often derived by the rebus principle.

From "Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies" by Jared M. Diamond

I grew up doing crosswords, riddles and rebuses.

From Los Angeles Times ● Jul. 28, 2025

Photograph: Universal Images Group/Getty Images In essence, Griffiths had to crack an elaborate Tudor code of rebuses, ciphers, heraldic motifs and symbolic flowers to discover who the man was.

From The Guardian ● May 19, 2015

More complex rebuses are pictures whose elements, correctly named and put together, make up words or sentences.

From Time Magazine Archive

Perhaps I should compose some rebuses for the King.

From Voices from the Past by Paul Alexander Bartlett

It was not by the Maya system, but by one of rebuses, that the old missionaries wrote what few books they composed for their unhappy Indian congregations.

From St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 8, May 1878, No. 7. An Illustrated Magazine for Young Folks by Various