Tattarrattat

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A rapping sound made by knocking loudly on a door, coined by James Joyce in Ulysses to imitate the noise
2. The sharp, repeated rap of a fist against a door, as famously onomatopoeic in James Joyce's novel Ulysses
3. An imitative word for the noise of a heavy knock on a door, invented by James Joyce for his 1922 novel

Etymology: "Tattarrattat" is a knocking sound that James Joyce invented for Ulysses, published in 1922. In the novel's "Cyclops" episode, the narrator's account of a knock at the door ends with a comic onomatopoeic flourish, and Joyce built the word to imitate the rapping itself: a hard double beat that rises and falls in a rhythm the ear can hear. Nothing about it is borrowed from another language, and no older English word stands behind it. The word is a pure imitation of sound, the same principle behind "knock," "tap," or "bang," but pushed to an extreme. Its repeated syllables and the t and r consonants mimic a sequence of blows rather than a single one. Because it was coined as a sound effect, it describes the noise and not any object or action in the story, which is part of why it stuck in dictionaries as a standalone noun.

Synonyms: knock, rap