Iconic means so well known that the thing stands for something bigger than itself. An iconic building, an iconic photograph, an iconic album.
It is one of the most overused words in modern journalism and marketing, where anything more than ten years old gets called iconic. The strict test is whether the thing has become a symbol — whether people use it to mean something else. Note the original religious sense: an icon is a painted image of a saint in Orthodox Christianity, and iconic described that. And in computing an icon is the small picture you click, which is a third and entirely literal use.
1adjectiveiconicSo well known that it symbolises something larger.
“The photograph became iconic almost overnight.”
synonyms: emblematic, symbolic
2adjectiverelatingRelating to religious images.
“The chapter deals with iconic painting in the eastern church.”
iconic is a quality of being symbolic.
Greek eikon meant an image or likeness. The word travelled from religious painting to any famous image to anything famous at all, which is a fair example of a word losing its edges through enthusiasm.
Ancient Greek
εἰκονικός
Latin
īconicus
English, today
iconic
From Latin īconicus, from Ancient Greek εἰκονικός. by surface analysis, icon + -ic.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA