Onomatopoeial

Part of speech: adjective

Definitions

1. Relating to or characterized by the formation of a name or a representation of a sound through imitation of the acoustic quality it denotes
2. Pertaining to words or expressions that imitate the actual sounds they represent, such as "buzz" or "hiss"
3. Of or involving the linguistic phenomenon where a word's sound directly echoes or mimics the real-world noise it describes

Etymology: Few words sound less like what they describe. A term for "buzz," "hiss" and "cuckoo" ought to snap or rattle, yet the English word for such words is a six-syllable Greek construction, and onomatopoeial stretches it further still. Its root is the Greek "onomatopoiia," built from "onoma," "name," and "poiein," "to make." The verb also gave Greek "poiētēs," a maker of verses, which became our "poet." For Greek writers the compound meant simply coining a name, though grammarians came to apply it above all to words formed by imitating sounds. Behind the idea lies an old philosophical argument. In Plato's "Cratylus," Socrates toys with the notion that names might naturally copy the things they name, so that the rolling letter rho suggests motion. Roman rhetoricians borrowed the Greek term rather than translate it. Quintilian observed that inventing new words this way, so admired among the Greeks, was barely allowed in Latin. Late Latin "onomatopoeia" passed into the rhetoric handbooks of Renaissance Europe, and English writers took it up in the later sixteenth century. George Puttenham, in "The Arte of English Poesie" (1589), tried to give each figure of speech a homely English name and rendered this one as "the New Namer," a fair translation of the Greek. The noun then needed an adjective, and English produced several. Writers tried "onomatopoetic," formed on the pattern of "poetic," as well as "onomatopoeic" and the plainer onomatopoeial, made by adding the ordinary suffix "-al" to the noun, as in "editorial" or "musical." "Onomatopoeic" eventually won the most ground. Its rivals survive as alternatives, still describing a crackle or a whoosh in a word that imitates nothing at all.

Synonyms: imitative, echoic, sound-representative, auditory, phonetic