A symbol in a writing system; a painted or incised conventionalized sign. These individual images or design elements make up systems such as hieroglyphics, pictographs, or petroglyphs. Glyphs range from concrete images, such as an animal or a house, to abstractions, such as the use of a footprint to indicate travel, to signs representing the sound of words. In the Mesoamerican system, a glyph may represent an idea, word, sound, syllable, or a combination of them.