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

It reminds me of a surrealist painting, or a rebus puzzle.

From Slate ● Aug. 6, 2021

A modern-day equivalent would be using a picture of an eye to represent “I” — a linguistic concept called the rebus principle.

From Washington Post ● Sep. 30, 2019

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

From New York Times ● Apr. 8, 2016

Linguists term this decisive innovation, which also underlies puns today, 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

John Hopkins was a peaceful citizen, who worked at rebuses of nights in a flat, but he was not without the fundamental spirit of resistance that comes with the battle-rage.

From The Voice of the City: Further Stories of the Four Million by O. Henry

And the greatest pages of his autobiography, written with his brush, will be only so many childish rebuses if we forget what astounding pages of History and Argument were turned before him.

From Holbein by Beatrice Fortescue