In the fourth chapter abbreviation is conceptualised as an imageword: the visual element of a medieval text. Juxtaposed with the concepts of memoria and visual text, abbreviation is thus re-defined as an element of medieval multimodalities that is, a meaning-making element, signifying not just onto the linguistic plane but also onto the visual, spatial and textual modes. The chapter also introduces visual pragmatics as a framework well suited for dealing with the built-in interpretative ambiguity of abbreviations, i.e. its visual-textual meanings.