As a ubiquitous human phenomenon, stereotyping is considered one of the biggest issues in contemporary social psychology, and widely covered in textbooks and scholarly studies. However, only a woefully limited number of works have touched on why and how stereotypes happen (e.g. McGarty et al 2002), and still little is known about the inner mechanism of stereotyping. It is in this context that the present paper argues for a semiotics of stereotypes, aiming to shed some critical new light on the workings of stereotypes. Although it has been grossly understudied as such, stereotyping deserves to be an inherently proper subject matter of semiotic inquiries, for it stands as a perfect example of social semiosis, in which process stereotypes, functioning as fixed mental models (Sebeok & Danesi 2000), are associated with objects, events, individuals and groups. These fixed models allow people the ease of modeling the world in which they are involved, and provide a window through which human semiosis can be observed from a cognitive semiotic perspective. One of the advantages of the semiotics of stereotypes is that it can easily enable us to straddle the two major yet long-alienated traditions of contemporary studies of the sign: Saussurean semiology and Peircean semiotics. The main reason lies in the fact that stereotypes can be thought of as a specific type of models (Yu & Zhang 2016), which, by means of various multimodal external forms and corresponding internal forms, are considered the building blocks of cognition (Sebeok & Danesi 2000). The concept of model not only works well in linking dyadic Saussurean relations, for instance signifier vis-à-vis signified, but also fits into the overall scheme of the Peircean triad of semiosis. Stereotypes, as special models that are as much culturally based as they are psychologically grounded, can work as a good illustration of the above-mentioned integrative power of models. For further elucidation, this paper also analyzes a number of classic examples found in literature, movies, real-life cases of communication and social psychology, among which are Snow White, vampire stories and social stigma, to name just a few. All these analyses, as well as the general argument in this paper, lead to a conclusion that supports the rightful place of the semiotics of stereotypes in the broader domain of cognitive semiotics, which in turn takes its own place in general semiotics.