Most languages have onomatopoeic words for the sounds animals make. In English, dogs woof , cats meow , and cows moo. Onomatopoeias, like alliteration and consonance, can bring your writing to life by making the words themselves sound compelling to your reader. Diego lay awake, listening to the unending sound of the clock on the mantelpiece. Diego lay awake, listening to the relentless tick-tock of the clock on the mantelpiece. Really pay attention to the way the words themselves sound.
Which sentence leaves you with a stronger impression of a clock ticking away across the room? Still not convinced that just the sound of a word can affect your reader? Consider the phenomenon known as sound symbolism. Sound symbolism describes the tendency for clusters of words with similar meanings to share certain sounds. Does your word start with gl-? Chances are, it does. Time Traveler for onomatopoeia The first known use of onomatopoeia was circa See more words from the same year.
Listen to Our Podcast About onomatopoeia. Get Word of the Day delivered to your inbox! Sign Up. Watch More on onomatopoeia. A Look at Uncommon Onomatopoeia Some imitative words are more surprising than others.
From the Editors at Merriam-Webster. Statistics for onomatopoeia Look-up Popularity. Style: MLA. Kids Definition of onomatopoeia. More from Merriam-Webster on onomatopoeia Britannica. Get Word of the Day daily email! Test Your Vocabulary. Can you spell these 10 commonly misspelled words? The morose poetry of Edgar Allan Poe gets the reader imagining soundscapes at every turn of the page.
The onomatopoeia as a meta theme runs parallel to language in the realm of sound symbolism. Words are sounds to which we attach meaning, but onomatopoeia is mimicry of sounds that appear all around us. It is directly connected to its meaning without the need for abstract definitions. More fundamentally, in the structure of the English language , there is a large proportion of words that share a particular phoneme and also a similar meaning.
This is the onomatopoeia as symbolic representation—in sound—of a fundamental response to an attribute of an object.
As onomatopoeias became words and language, the fundamental preliterate connections got built in. There is a cascade of similar associations throughout the language. This quirk has even been observed experimentally. In the experiment, people who spoke different languages were shown two shapes, one of which was round and one spiky.
There was a strong preference to call the spiky shape takete and the rounded shape baluba.
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