A certain type of word poses as the thing it describes. The sound a heavy book makes when dropped on a wooden floor is almost exactly what the word “thud” refers to: a dull, slightly embarrassed sound. When people discuss onomatopoeia, they are referring to that tiny coincidence that appears in thousands of words across numerous languages. On the surface, the definition is fairly straightforward: a word that mimics or resembles the sound it refers to. However, the closer you look, the stranger and more fascinating it becomes.
The word itself is derived from Ancient Greek and is a combination of the words onoma, which means name, and poiein, which means to make. naming. For a term that most of us first saw written next to the word buzz on a middle school whiteboard, it’s difficult to ignore how poetic that is. The majority of English words don’t really relate to what they describe; for example, the sound “book” doesn’t tell you anything about books. However, onomatopoeic words purposefully and subtly defy this rule.
They are constantly sought after by writers, frequently without conscious thought. There’s a crackling campfire. A bottle of champagne bursts. As the characters continue to converse, there is a distant boom of thunder. These words allow the reader to hear the scene rather than visualize it from a distance, which is something that ordinary description can’t quite accomplish. Onomatopoeia is thought to be the closest written language comes to making sound.
It tends to group together in specific categories. In contemporary writing, mechanical noises are just as important as animal sounds, such as meow, moo, bark, roar, cluck, and baa. A vehicle honks. An engine roars. Something electrical zaps, and the term has strangely expanded to include interference that is not audible. Even eating has its own vocabulary, such as slurp, crunch, and gulp. Depending on the shoe, footsteps can patter or clomp.
The degree to which onomatopoeia varies depending on the language you speak is peculiar and, for some reason, seldom discussed. In English, a clock goes tick tock. Tic tac in Italian and Spanish. It is called dī dā in Mandarin, kachi kachi in Japanese, and ṭik-ṭik in Bengali, Hindi, and Urdu. The same time. The sound is still mechanical. Different alphabets, different ears, different outcomes. Frogs are even more chaotic. For example, English speakers have decided to say “ribbit,” which is actually the voice of a specific species found in California, while the Ancient Greeks, following Aristophanes’ dictation from marsh frogs, settled on the wonderfully insane brekekekex koax koax.
Certain onomatopoeic words have become obsolete. Before centuries of drift smoothed it down, bleat sounded much more like a real sheep, more like blairt in medieval pronunciation. Cuckoo, on the other hand, has hardly changed at all, most likely due to the bird’s constant reminders of its intended sound. Although most contemporary speakers no longer perceive the echo, words like fanfare, pigeon, and cough most likely originated as imitative noises as well.
This could be the subtle allure of onomatopoeia. It’s one of the few instances where language briefly acknowledges that it is listening to the outside world and ceases to be arbitrary.
