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In the terminology of the American semiotician and philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce, a "sign" is either an index, an icon, or a symbol. Contrary to the continental European terminological tradition, the term symbol is defined as a purely conventional sign. Peirce's terminology strongly influenced US linguistics, which in turn influenced European. In Peirce's terminology, the icon (ideal-typical) differs from the symbol, which is a sign whose relation to the signified is purely conventional and based "neither on resemblance nor on a cause-effect relationship". Defined positively, an icon is a sign in which "a likeness, a resemblance can be ascertained" between the sign and the signified. The icon in Peirce's sense is largely synonymous with the symbol in the tradition of European terminology. Peirce saw images as a group of signs in their own right and called them "icons". In more recent visual studies, on the other hand, the term icon plays an important role as a synonym for “image”. For example, the growing importance of images in modern media societies and the corresponding reorientation of the cultural sciences, which have hitherto been more linguistically oriented, are leading to greater concerns about the visual nature of our culture.

“Arrow signs”, for example, are ubiquitous in modern living environments: They provide spatial orientation, can be found on technical devices and mediate between images, writing and numbers, in diagrams, formulas or maps, in both old and new media. The material dimension of this sign and its origin from the nomadic structure of the bow weapon is largely buried in view of the remarkable differentiation of the sign function. In any case, with the directional arrow we mostly unhesitatingly follow a sign whose material referent represented a dangerous, often deadly projectile for long periods of human history.