There is a written-only language that tries to use only meanings and no sounds:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blissymbols

Its history is interesting—its creator grew up in an English-speaking family initially living in China, and he learned to read Chinese but not speak it, in distinction to a huge number of people who learn to speak Chinese but not read it. It seems that that experience of thinking of the Chinese hanzi characters as meanings (initially in his case English meanings) rather than sounds eventually led him to try to make a written conlang with a similar characteristic.

Edit: this is also interesting to me because I myself know a few Chinese characters whose pronunciation I have no idea of (the ones that came to mind for me right away were 一，二，三，上，下，女, 日, 本, 天, and 月, although I'm sure there are several others). Maybe I have a little tiny mini-Charles Bliss experience when I see those characters, like "oh yeah, I know what that means, no idea how you would say it though!".

Edit: according to Wikipedia Bliss was actually a German-speaking refugee in China, so I misremembered the circumstances of his exposure to Chinese!