Iconicity is a term used in cognitive science and gesture studies to denote an informative relation between the form of an utterance and the meaning of that utterance. With good iconic design, the form of an utterance can directly invite a suitable perceiver with a certain degree of initiation, to grasp a meaning in the right direction. Despite the now increasingly touted importance of iconicity for understanding human languages, it proves difficult to define more formally. When the term is defined, researchers tend to base iconicity on resemblances, such that A is iconic of B, if A resembles B in some relevant respect. In the philosophy of depiction fundamental issues have been raised against resemblance-based accounts. Even when barring such metaphysical issues, it has recently been argued that for all practical research purposes, a ’state-of-the-art’ definition of iconicity should also do away with resemblances. Instead iconicity is in the eye of the beholder (mind-to-world relation) as opposed to a property of the environment (world-to-mind relation). In this paper I suggest for all practical purposes that there is an alternative explanatory route available to us, which is paved more broadly by 4E approaches (embodied, embedded, enactive, extended) and the philosophy of depiction. Taking this road should lead to a 'distributed' view, where iconicity arises in a niche-constructed organism-environment system. This paper provides the bare bones for such a view, broadening the discussion, and hopefully drawing other perspectives in so that a distributed view of iconicity can become fully fleshed out.