Onomatopoeia

Part of speech: noun

Pronunciation: /ˌɒnəˌmætəˈpiːə/

Definitions

  1. A word whose sound mimics the noise or action it denotes, such as "buzz" or "hiss"
  2. The linguistic phenomenon where a term's pronunciation imitates the actual sound associated with its referent
  3. A term formed to replicate the sound of what it describes such as animal noises or mechanical sounds

Etymology: Ask what the label for "buzz," "cuckoo" and "sizzle" sounds like, and the answer is nothing at all. It is a learned coinage, a mouthful of Greek with no hiss or bang in it, and its literal meaning is far broader: "name-making." It begins with two Greek pieces. "Onoma" meant "name," and it descends from the same Indo-European root as English "name," which reached us by inheritance through the Germanic line. "Poiein" meant "to make, to do, to produce," the verb that also gave Greek "poiētēs," a maker, and so our "poet" and "poem." Put together, "onomatopoiein" meant "to coin names," and "onomatopoiia" was the act of coining a word. In principle any newly minted word qualified, but the clearest case of inventing a word from scratch is copying a noise, and the term came to mean "the coining of a word in imitation of a sound." Latin borrowed it as "onomatopoeia" and kept it as a technical term of rhetoric. Quintilian, writing in the first century AD, discussed it and observed that the Greeks were much freer than Romans to invent words this way. He pointed to Latin words like "mugitus" (lowing), "sibilus" (hissing) and "murmur" as examples of the type. English took the word straight from Latin in the later sixteenth century, when Renaissance writers were cataloguing the figures of speech of classical rhetoric. George Puttenham, in "The Arte of English Poesie" (1589), tried to give each figure a homely English name and rendered this one as "the New-namer." That was a faithful translation of a word that is itself a made name, but it did not catch on. The Greek word won, and with it the narrow sense of sound-copying. The older, wider idea of making any new name dropped away.

Synonyms: sound imitation, echoism, phonetic mimicry, sound effect, imitative word