Rebus-Another way of communicating

In linguistics, the Rebus Principle means using existing symbols, such as pictograms, purely for their sounds regardless of their meaning, to represent new words. Often used in word puzzles and games.  Many ancient writing systems used the Rebus principle to represent abstract words, which otherwise would be hard to be represented by pictograms.  Some linguists believe that the Chinese developed their writing system according to the rebus principle, and Egyptian hieroglyphs sometimes used a similar system.
A rebus (Latin: "by things") is a kind of word puzzle that uses pictures to represent words or parts of words.