Histopathology and cytopathology developed for the microscopic examination of tissue samples a specific terminology to describe type and shape of objects and patterns in the composition of nuclei, cells, tissue and anatomical elements. We map such a terminology to Bertin’s visual variables and propose three methods to describe “shape grammar” (1) With a formal, mathematical language, (2) with graphs and (3) by natural language descriptions. Finally, we propose practical applications of shape properties and shape grammar for explainability of AI algorithms in computational pathology.