Shush! If you listen carefully, new words are whooshing into existence.
Onomatopoeia is the formation or use of words that imitate the sounds associated with the objects or actions they refer to. A common literary technique, onomatopoeia is also an ancient and still productive means for new words to enter language.
Many onomatopoetic words come from animal sounds: the chirp of birds, the hiss of snakes, and the cat’s meow. Some of these animal sounds have stayed restricted to the animals that issue them. For example, you don’t typically hear or read of anything neighing other than a horse. Other terms for animal sounds have expanded beyond their origins. Phones can buzz, engines can purr, and waves can roar along the shore.
Onomatopoeia has brought a plethora of useful verbs into English, from sounds that imitate quick motions (swish, swoosh, thwack, whiz, whoosh, and zoom), sounds that imitate machinery (clank, putter, vroom), sounds that imitate human speech (giggle, murmur, phew, and shush) and bodily functions (burp, munch, sniff), and sounds that imitate the movement of liquid (fizz, plop, sizzle, and splat).
Poets sometimes use a technique similar to onomatopoeia when they create imitative sounds from a series of words that by themselves aren’t imitative of anything. In Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” there’s a stanza that reads:
The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew,
The furrow followed free;
We were the first that ever burst
Into that silent sea.
Here, the repetition of “f” sounds creates a rippling effect, reminiscent of the water churning in a ship’s wake.
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