The history of the rebus

Q: How old is the rebus?

The rebus principle — using a picture for its sound rather than its meaning — is roughly 5,000 years old and appears in early Egyptian hieroglyphic and Sumerian cuneiform writing. The rebus as a deliberate puzzle for entertainment is usually traced to 16th-century France.

Q: Where does the word “rebus” come from?

From Latin “non verbis, sed rebus” — “not by words, but by things”. The name attached itself to picture-riddles in France around the 16th century and stuck.

Q: What was the first rebus?

No single “first rebus” survives. The earliest known uses of the idea are sound-puns inside early writing systems; the earliest rebuses made purely for fun that we can still point to are French picture-riddles and punning heraldic arms from the late Middle Ages onward.

Q: Are emoji messages rebuses?

When an emoji stands for a sound or word — 🐝 for “be”, ❤ for “love” — that is exactly the rebus principle at work. A string like “I ❤ U” is a tiny rebus message.

Updated September 28, 2026 · 6 min read · by the Rebus Master team · Favo Games · sources

The rebus is one of the oldest word tricks in the world: using a picture for its sound instead of its meaning. That single idea helped turn drawings into writing about 5,000 years ago, decorated the shields of medieval knights, amused Leonardo da Vinci and Lewis Carroll, filled newspaper puzzle pages, powered a TV game show for decades — and lives on every time you text somebody “I ❤ U”.

The rebus principle: how pictures learned to spell

Early writing had a problem. Drawing a sun to mean “sun” is easy — but how do you draw “belief”, or “tomorrow”, or somebody's name? The breakthrough, which scholars call the rebus principle, was to borrow a picture for its sound: draw a bee and a leaf, and suddenly you can write belief. Hieroglyphs read this way were in use at Abydos in Egypt as early as about 3400 BCE, and Mesopotamian scribes used the same principle on proto-cuneiform tablets around 3100–2900 BCE (Wikipedia: Rebus) — stretching a limited set of pictures into a system that could record anything people could say. In a very real sense, the pun came before the alphabet — and every rebus you solve today is a small reenactment of how writing itself got started.

“Not by words, but by things”

The name arrived much later. It comes from the Latin phrase non verbis, sed rebus — “not by words, but by things”. A French account from 1650 by Gilles Ménage traces the puzzle-sense to satirical picture pieces made by clerks in Picardy for carnival (Etymonline), and English had the word by 1605 (Merriam-Webster); from there the rebus spread across Europe as polite entertainment. The French connection also gave us the classic parlor form: a row of small pictures, letters and symbols that, read aloud in sequence, produce a phrase the images themselves never show.

Canting arms: rebuses you could carry into battle

Medieval and Renaissance heraldry loved a visual pun. Canting arms are coats of arms that spell their owner's name in pictures — the heraldic equivalent of a rebus. The city of Oxford's arms show an ox fording water (Wikipedia: Coat of arms of Oxford), and Congleton in Cheshire bears a conger eel, a lion (Latin leo) and a barrel (a tun): conger-leo-tun. A shield could literally say a name to people who couldn't read it. Rebuses also went onto buildings: Sir Richard Weston (d. 1541) had his rebus, a tun for the last syllable of his name, set in terracotta plaques on the walls of Sutton Place in Surrey (Wikipedia: Rebus).

Leonardo's puzzle sheets and Lewis Carroll's picture letters

The rebus attracted famous minds. Leonardo da Vinci filled manuscript sheets with little picture-riddles — quick sketches trading on Italian sound-puns; one sheet of his pictographs is kept today in the Royal Collection. Three centuries later, Lewis Carroll, author of Alice in Wonderland, wrote picture-puzzle rebus letters to the children he befriended (Wikipedia: Rebus). In the 18th century, printers produced whole hieroglyphic Bibles for children — A Curious Hieroglyphick Bible appeared in London in 1784 and in an American edition in 1788 (Wikipedia; Library of Congress copy) — replacing key words of scripture with woodcut pictures so early readers could “read” along — the same reading-by-pictures idea early-learning books still use.

Rebus puzzle: the word STAND printed over the letter I — I understand — The parlor classic, as we draw it in Rebus Master: *stand* over I reads “I understand”. Position is part of the language — nine more tricks like this here.

The print golden age

Cheap printing made the rebus a mass medium. From the late 18th century onward, magazines and newspapers ran rebus corners; and letters written in rebus form stayed popular into the 19th century (Wikipedia: Rebus). The Victorian puzzle page — rebuses, riddles, word squares — is the direct ancestor of the modern games section, and of the brain teaser as a genre. By the early 20th century the rebus had settled into the shape most people picture today: a strip of images and letters with a satisfying phrase hiding inside.

The game-show era

Television gave the rebus its biggest stage yet. NBC's Concentration, which premiered in 1958 and ran on and off until 1991 (Wikipedia: Concentration), hid a rebus behind a wall of numbered tiles; contestants matched prizes to clear tiles and raced to read the emerging puzzle. It proved something puzzle designers still rely on: watching a rebus reveal itself piece by piece is dramatic — the same slow-reveal tension that drives our own daily rebus, where every correct letter uncovers a little more of the answer.

The emoji era: everyone writes rebuses now

Then the rebus quietly conquered the world again. “I ❤ NY” is a rebus. So is nearly every emoji text where a picture stands in for a word or sound — 🐝 for be, 🌙 for night. Five thousand years after scribes first borrowed a picture for its sound, billions of people do it daily without thinking. The puzzle form never went away either: it just moved into apps. Our own contribution is a modern twist on the oldest trick — an illustrated rebus you decode through a cryptogram keyboard, across 1,700+ levels and one free puzzle in your browser every day.

The rebus timeline

c. 3400–2900 BCE — Egyptian and Mesopotamian scribes use the rebus principle: pictures borrowed for their sounds make full writing possible.
Middle Ages — Canting arms: coats of arms and church carvings spell names in punning pictures.
Late 1400s — Leonardo da Vinci sketches sheets of picture-riddles.
1500s–1600s — Picardy’s satirical picture pieces give the game its French name; English records rebus by 1605.
1784 — Hieroglyphic Bibles and rebus letters make picture-reading a household pastime.
1800s — Newspaper and magazine puzzle pages turn the rebus into mass entertainment; Lewis Carroll mails picture letters to children.
1958 — Concentration puts a slow-reveal rebus at the heart of a TV game show that runs, on and off, until 1991.
2010s — Emoji texting makes casual rebus-writing a daily habit for billions.
Today — The rebus goes daily-puzzle: a fresh illustrated rebus every midnight UTC, plus galleries with answers and a printable classroom pack.

Rebus history FAQ

How old is the rebus?

The rebus principle — a picture used for its sound — is roughly 5,000 years old and shows up in early Egyptian and Sumerian writing. The rebus as a puzzle made purely for fun is usually traced to 16th-century France.

Where does the word “rebus” come from?

From the Latin non verbis, sed rebus — “not by words, but by things”. The name attached itself to French picture-riddles around the 16th century.

What was the first rebus?

No single “first rebus” survives. The oldest traceable uses are sound-puns inside early writing systems; the oldest rebuses made deliberately for fun are late-medieval canting arms and French picture-riddles.

Are emoji messages rebuses?

When an emoji stands for a sound or a word — 🐝 for “be”, ❤ for “love” — that's the rebus principle exactly. “I ❤ U” is a three-symbol rebus.

Sources and further reading: the Library of Congress on rebus puzzles in historic newspapers, the Wikipedia overview of the rebus, and A Material History of Rebuses.

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About this guide: written by the Favo Games team, the studio behind Rebus Master. We’ve designed and illustrated 1,700+ rebus levels — these guides distill what we’ve learned making them. Illustrations are AI-assisted; every puzzle, hint and answer is written and checked by hand.