icon [M16th] Greek eikōn, the source of icon, meant ‘likeness, image’ which is how it was first used in English. Another early use in English was for a simile, a figure of speech in which two things are compared, as in ‘as white as snow’. Later it meant ‘a portrait, a picture’, and especially an illustration in a natural history book. The ‘portrait’ sense partly continues in the modern use for ‘a devotional painting of a holy figure’, not found before the mid 19th century. The use to mean a celebrated figure such as a sporting or pop star dates from the early 1950s. Icons in computing, those symbols or graphic representations on screens, appeared in 1982. At various times in the history of the Christian Church, reformers, among them English Puritans in the 16th and 17th centuries, have condemned and destroyed religious images. Such a zealot is an iconoclast [E17th], a breaker of images—the -clast bit is from Greek klan, ‘to break’. Since the mid 19th century an iconoclast is also a person who attacks a cherished belief or respected institution.