Onomatopoetically

Part of speech: adverb

Definitions

1. Using language that imitates or echoes the sounds of things being described, often through phonetic representation in written form
2. In a way that replicates the actual sounds made by objects or actions through speech
3. Characterized by language that echoes or closely resembles real noises in its expression

Etymology: Hidden inside this tongue-twister is a poet. The Greek verb "poiein", "to make", gave Greek "poiētēs", a maker, which became our "poet", and it also gave "onomatopoiía", literally "name-making". The first half is "onoma", "name", a distant cousin of the English word "name" itself, descended from the same ancient Indo-European root. To the Greeks, name-making meant coining a new word, and grammarians applied the term above all to words built to echo what they named: a buzz, a hiss, a cuckoo's call. Roman rhetoricians borrowed the Greek term into Latin as "onomatopoeia", and from Late Latin it reached English in the later sixteenth century. George Puttenham, in "The Arte of English Poesie" (1589), tried to give it a homegrown alternative, calling the figure "the New Namer". His label did not catch on. The Greek one did. The adjective came much later, by the nineteenth century, formed on the model of "poetic". It rivaled the shorter "onomatopoeic", and the two still compete. Adding "-ally" produced the adverb, and that ending carries its own surprise. The "-al" part is Latin "-ālis", which came into English through Old French. The "-ly" is purely Germanic: Old English "-līċe", from Proto-Germanic "*līką", meaning "body" or "form". The same word survives in "lychgate", the roofed churchyard gate where a body waited for burial. To do something "-ly" was originally to do it in the shape of something. So onomatopoetically stacks Greek, Latin and Old English on top of one another to mean, roughly, "in the form of the making of names". That makes it a word about inventing words, which is itself a piece of invented word-building.