Because the Ancient Egyptians did not write any vowels, writing the phonetic part of words alone would not have enabled them to render the precise meaning of a word. How, for instance, would one have been able to distinguish Hqr, "to be hungry" from Hqr, "hungry person"?

The opposite is true as well. Simply using ideograms to write words would only have allowed the Ancient Egyptians to write down general concepts. Any ideogram can represent more than one word. The ideogram for instance can represent "to eat", "to drink", "to speak", "to think", and so on. This, in fact, is one of the reasons why it is so hard to understand texts (if that is what they are) from the Early Dynastic Period.

In addition, more abstract words such as "father", "mother", "love" or "hate", as well as words with a more grammatical purpose, such as prepositions or pronouns, are very hard to render using only ideograms.

To solve these problems, the Ancient Egyptians usually wrote most words as a combination of phonograms and ideograms. Ideograms used in addition to phonograms to help determine the meaning of these phonograms are called determinatives and in most cases are written at the end of the word they determine. Thus is read Hqr, with the sign determining that Hqr is an activity of the mouth: "to be hungry". Words can have more than one determinative if additional ideograms help to further specify the meaning. Adding the sign to this word gives , Hqr and clarifies that in this case Hqr is a "hungry person".

The same phonograms combined with different ideograms can also represent different meanings. nfr.t, for instance, means "the beautiful one". With as determinative the "one" is specified as being a woman, resulting in the meaning "the beautiful woman". With as determinative the "one" is specified as being the White Crown of Upper Egypt, resulting in the meaning "the beautiful crown". And with , it is a cow that is said to be beautiful, giving the meaning "the beautiful cow".

Some words could be written either with or without extra determinatives. The name of the god Ptah, for instance, would quite often simply be written as , ptH, using only phonetic signs. In some cases, however, it could also be written as or , with and as a general determinatives for "god"; or as or , with or as a specific determinativse representing Ptah himself. The choice whether or not to add the determinative in such cases depended on the available space and on the preferences of the writer. The choice of a general or a more specific determinative would depend on the personal preferences of the writer as well, and, in the case of Ptah, on religious motivations.

Another example is the word rn, "name", which is usually written as , and occasionally with the extra determinative as . Note that can be written horizontally and vertically. Again, the available space would determine how a scribe would position this sign in the rest of the text.

Short and common words, or words that simply can not be represented by ideograms, were written using phonograms only. A good example of words without determinatives are prepositions such as , m, "in", , n "of" and , r "to" (we will deal with prepositions in more detail in a later chapter).

Words that could easily be represented by an ideogram, would sometimes be written ideographically. Usually, a simple stroke is added to indicate that the ideogram indeed means what it says. Thus means "face" and is read as Hr (the phonetic value Hr for being the result of the fact that the word "face" consisted of the consonants H + r). The name of the god Ptah is sometimes also written using an ideogram that represents him or , without any phonograms and, in this case, even without the stroke .

Words can also be written as a combination of ideograms. The group , S "lake", for instance, combines the lake with the geographic ideogram and the stroke , the latter again indicating that the preceding signs indeed mean what they represent. Alternatively, might also be explained as a space-filler.

Similarly, the group tA, "land" combines the ideogram for "land" with and .

Some ideograms can be accompanied by one or more phonograms, but the added phonograms only represent part of the phonetic value of the word that is written. , wA.t "road" uses the ideogram in combination with the stroke and the phonogram , t, but the signs to represent wA are missing. Note that this word can also be written as , with the phonograms representing the full phonetic value of the word. The writing could also be considered as an abbreviation for .

- Combining phonograms and ideograms -