Device

Device (late Lat. divisa, 'a drawing'), if in a wider sense, applicable to emblems on shields, such as described by Homer, is, in a more restricted use of the word, a decoration with accompanying legend, assumed by an individual rather than a family, and for the purpose not of publicity, like the badge (with which it has sometimes been confounded), but of mystification, with covert allusion to the circumstances of the bearer. It is, in fact, a rebus or painted riddle, with a legend allusive to it, as the knot borne by Sir Thomas Heneage, of a shape suggestive of a heart, with the inscription 'Fast though untied; and the heart borne by Lord Latimer, with the legend 'Dieu et ma fiancée.' See BADGE.