Onomatopoeia

Onomatopoeia (/ˌɒnəˌmætəˈpiːə, -ˌmɑː-/ (listen); from the Greek ὀνοματοποιία; ὄνομα for 'name' and ποιέω for 'I make', adjectival form: 'onomatopoeic' or 'onomatopoetic', also onomatopœia is the process of creating a word that phonetically imitates, resembles, or suggests the sound that it describes. As such words are uncountable nouns, onomatopoeia refers to the property of such words. Common occurrences of words of the onomatopoeia process include animal noises such as 'oink', 'meow' (or 'miaow'), 'roar' and 'chirp'. Onomatopoeia can differ between languages: it conforms to some extent to the broader linguistic system; hence the sound of a clock may be expressed as 'tick tock' in English, 'tic tac' in Spanish and Italian, 'dī dā' in Mandarin, 'katchin katchin' in Japanese, or 'tik-tik' in Hindi. Although in the English language the term onomatopoeia means 'the imitation of a sound', the compound word onomatopoeia (ὀνοματοποιία) in the Greek language means 'making or creating names'. For words that imitate sounds, the term ὴχομιμητικό (echomimetico) or echomimetic) is used. The word ὴχομιμητικό (echomimetico) derives from 'ὴχώ', meaning 'echo' or 'sound', and 'μιμητικό', meaning 'mimetic' or 'imitating'. In the case of a frog croaking, the spelling may vary because different frog species around the world make different sounds: Ancient Greek brekekekex koax koax (only in Aristophanes' comic play The Frogs) probably for marsh frogs; English ribbit for species of frog found in North America; English verb croak for the common frog. Some other very common English-language examples are hiccup, zoom, bang, beep, moo, and splash. Machines and their sounds are also often described with onomatopoeia: honk or beep-beep for the horn of an automobile, and vroom or brum for the engine. In speaking of a mishap involving an audible arcing of electricity, the word 'zap' is often used (and its use has been extended to describe non-auditory effects generally connoting the same sort of localized but thorough interference or destruction similar to that produced in short-circuit sparking). Human sounds sometimes provide instances of onomatopoeia, as when mwah is used to represent a kiss. For animal sounds, words like quack (duck), moo (cow), bark or woof (dog), roar (lion), meow/miaow or purr (cat), cluck (chicken) and baa (sheep) are typically used in English (both as nouns and as verbs). Some languages flexibly integrate onomatopoeic words into their structure. This may evolve into a new word, up to the point that the process is no longer recognized as onomatopoeia. One example is the English word 'bleat' for sheep noise: in medieval times it was pronounced approximately as 'blairt' (but without an R-component), or 'blet' with the vowel drawled, which more closely resembles a sheep noise than the modern pronunciation. An example of the opposite case is 'cuckoo', which, due to continuous familiarity with the bird noise down the centuries, has kept approximately the same pronunciation as in Anglo-Saxon times and its vowels have not changed as they have in the word furrow.