1) Different types of signs

Although it used pictures as a means to transport ideas and thought, hieroglyphic can not be considered as merely pictographic.  In a purely pictographic writing, each sign means what it represents. For instance, a sign representing a cow would convey the meaning "cow", the image of a man would mean "man", and so on. A big disadvantage of this type of writing is that it can only be used to refer to material things. Writing words with a more abstract meaning is near impossible.
The number of different words that can be written with a purely pictographic writing is thus very limited.

To solve this problem, hieroglyphic basically distinguishes between two types of signs:

• ideograms are signs that mean what they represent. One ideogram can represent more than one word, or it can represent a more general sense and not a specific meaning.
• phonograms are signs that have a phonetic value. They represent one, two or three consonants.

Most words were therefore usually written by combining phonograms and ideograms. The phonograms would make up the consonants of the word whereas the ideograms conveyed the word's meaning. This combination not only provided hieroglyphic writing a great flexibility, it also allowed a better distinction between words that consisted of the same consonants.
Because the Egyptians only wrote consonants and not their vowels, several words would be written in the same way, even though they may have had different meanings. For instance, the verbs "to seek" and "to act stupidly" both consisted of the consonants w + kh + '. The difference between the two different verbs can be conveyed only by adding some ideograms to the written consonants. Thus the verb "to seek" could be determined by an ideogram representing running legs, whereas the verb "to act stupidly" was determined by a sign representing something bad.
To write the word "fool, a man who acts stupidly", it sufficed to add the ideogram representing a man to the verb "to act stupidly".
Ideograms added in such a way to phonetically written words are called determinatives because they determinate the meaning of the written word.

Not all words were written in this manner, however. Very common or short words were sometimes written by using ideograms or phonograms only. Words that were normally written with phonetic signs only are pronouns, some prepositions, such as "in" or "on" and so on.
Some signs were used both as ideograms and as phonograms. The word for house, for instance, consisted of the consonants p+r. The sign that was used to write the word "house" could also be used as a phonetic sign to represent the sound pr.
When such a sign is used to represent what it means rather than a sound, it is often followed by a small vertical line, the so-called stroke-determinative. For instance, when the sign that represents a house is used to convey the word "house", it will be followed by a stroke. A stroke-determinative thus indicates that the preceding sign is an ideogram and that it means what it represents.
A stroke-determinative can also be used as a space filler. In that case, it does not necessarily indicate that the previous sign means what it represents.

2) Some ideograms

The following is a non-exhaustive list of signs that were used as ideograms. Several of these ideograms have a more general meaning. As noted above, some of these signs may also have had a phonetic value. These are covered in the following lessons.

Sign   General meaning man, person woman people, mankind, Egyptians child, (to be) young old man, (to be) old, to lean man of authority noble person, dead person god, king king god, king goddess, queen be high, rejoice, support, exalt praise, pray force, effort eat, drink, speak, think, feel lift, carry be weary, weak enemy, foreigner, rebel enemy, death to lie down, death, bury mummy, form, likeness head hair, mourn eye, to see nose, smell, joy, contempt ear, to listen tooth force, action, effort offer, present arm, bend, cease embrace phallus, beget, urinate, moisture leg, foot walk, run move backwards flesh, part of the body tumour, odour, disease cattle, cow, bull savage, storm skin, mammal Sign  General meaning bird small, bad, weak, negative fish snake, worm tree plant, flower wood, tree corn grain sky, above sun, light, time night, darkness star, night, time fire, heat, cook air, wind, sail stone copper, bronze sand, minerals, pellets water, liquid lake, channel irrigated land road, to travel, position desert, mountain, foreign land foreign (country or person) town, village (in Egypt) house, building door, to open, to close box, coffin boat, ship, navigation clothe, linen bind, document knife, cut hoe, cultivate, hack up break, divide, cross cup loaf, cake, offering festival, ritual book, writing, abstract things one, stroke-determinative plural, several, multitude