device vs symbol

device

noun
  • An image or logo denoting official or proprietary authority or provenience. 

  • A peripheral device; an item of hardware. 

  • An improvised explosive device, home-made bomb 

  • A technique that an author or speaker uses to evoke an emotional response in the audience; a rhetorical device. 

  • An image used in whole or in part as a trademark or service mark. 

  • A motto, emblem, or other mark used to distinguish the bearer from others. A device differs from a badge or cognizance primarily as it is a personal distinction, and not a badge borne by members of the same house successively. 

  • A project or scheme, often designed to deceive; a stratagem; an artifice. 

  • Any piece of equipment made for a particular purpose, especially a mechanical or electrical one. 

symbol

noun
  • A thing considered the embodiment of a concept or object. 

  • A type of noun whereby the form refers to the same entity independently of the context; a symbol arbitrarily denotes a referent. See also icon and index. 

  • A signalling event on a communications channel; a signal that cannot be further divided into meaningful information. 

  • An internal identifier used by a debugger to relate parts of the compiled program to the corresponding names in the source code. 

  • A character or glyph representing an idea, concept or object. 

  • A summary of a dogmatic statement of faith. 

  • The numerical expression which defines a plane's position relative to the assumed axes. 

verb
  • To symbolize. 

How often have the words device and symbol occurred in a corpus of books? (source: Google Ngram Viewer )