A word that imitates the sound it names — bang, hiss, cuckoo. Literally 'the making of a name'.
What it really means
Onomatopoeia is the making of a word out of a noise. Bang. Hiss. Splash. Cuckoo. The thing makes a sound, and the sound becomes its name.
The word is Greek and it arrived in English in the 1570s, already fully assembled: onoma, a name, and a form of poiein, to make. The same poiein sits inside poet, which is why a poet, in the oldest sense, is not a feeler of feelings but a maker. Onomatopoeia is name-making.
There is an obvious joke in the word, and it is worth stating plainly: the word for sounding like the thing does not sound like anything. Six syllables of Greek machinery to describe splat.
The more interesting point is that these words are not universal, though it feels as if they should be. A sound is a physical event, the same in Osaka and Oslo, and yet the word for it is not. An English dog says woof, a French one ouaf, a Japanese one wan-wan. Each language hears the same animal through the sounds it already has, and produces something that its own speakers find obvious and everyone else finds slightly wrong.
Which makes onomatopoeia less like a recording than like a translation: not the noise itself, but the closest thing to it that your language was already able to say.
Where it comes from
The same poiein that gives English poet: a poet is a maker, and this is name-making.
Myths & misconceptions
Onomatopoeic words sound the same in every language, because sounds are sounds.
They are shaped by the sound system of the language that makes them. A dog says woof in English, ouaf in French, wan-wan in Japanese and hev-hev in Turkish. Every one of them is imitating the same animal.
Onomatopoeia is a poetic device.
It is that, but it is first a way words get made. Cuckoo, whisper, murmur, crack and hiss are not decorations; they are the ordinary names of things, built out of the noise the thing makes.
How it connects
- Allegorythe other Greek rhetorical term in this set, and the one that works by pointing elsewhere.
Questions people ask
- What does onomatopoeia mean?
- A word formed in imitation of the sound it refers to — bang, hiss, splash — and the process of forming words that way. It is Greek for 'the making of a name'.
- Why is onomatopoeia such a hard word to say?
- Because it is a straight borrowing from Greek that English never wore down. It arrived in the 1570s with its shape intact, and the word for imitating sounds is, awkwardly, the least imitative word in the set.