Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- n. The formation or use of words such as buzz or murmur that imitate the sounds associated with the objects or actions they refer to.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- n. A word formed in imitation of the sound of the thing it signifies; an imitative word. See the extract.
Wiktionary
- n. The property of a word of sounding like what it represents.
- n. A word which has the property of onomatopoeia, such as "gurgle" or "hiss".
- n. The use of language whose sound imitates that which it names.
WordNet 3.0
- n. using words that imitate the sound they denote
Etymologies
- Late Latin, from Greek onomatopoiiā, from onomatopoios, coiner of names : onoma, onomat-, name; see nŏ̄-men- in Indo-European roots + poiein, to make; see kwei-2 in Indo-European roots.
Examples
“I like the word onomatopoeia, and not just because I still remember how to spell it from third grade spelling classes.”
“If the "pteetsee" part of that means bird or birds milk, I think it's a great bit of onomatopoeia, just like that the Chinese word for 'cat' sounds a lot like the noise a cat makes.”
“This morning it was Krumphau - the "Crooked Cut", though I like to imagine a certain onomatopoeia in the term.”
“The masthead is in a font that is made to look cracked, this links to the idea of onomatopoeia that 'kerrang' sounds like the crashing sound of a symbol, connoting again the style of music the magazine is based on.”
“Flag is thought possibly to be an onomatopoeia, which is to say flap sounds a bit like a flag flapping.”
podictionary - for word lovers - dictionary etymology, trivia & history
“Still, there was time enough for them to shout out the sounds of letters in chorus everyday and to memorize the words "onomatopoeia" and "metaphor.”
“BRIC À BRAC (a French word, formed by a kind of onomatopoeia, meaning a heterogeneous collection of odds and ends; cf. _de bric et de broc_, corresponding to our "by hook or by crook"; or by reduplication from”
Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 "Brescia" to "Bulgaria"
“My favorite word at the time was onomatopoeia, and the boys got a big kick out of the pee sound in that.”
“Finally he took his stance, wig-wagged his butt a bit, then weighed into the ball-a nice clean stroke, the solid thwock, if I maybe allowed just one little onomatopoeia.”
“What onomatopoeia causes your inner word nerd to SNAP, CRACKLE and POP with joy?”
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘onomatopoeia’.
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Interpreters' Speak
team sheet, pivot language, team leader, mini-plenary, plenary week, mission order, AIC colleague, SCIC, mission, mike, adding a new lang..., language booth and 499 more...
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G[r]eek
A collection of words found in English that are either purely Greek or have Greek etymology.
Please add with caution and certainty. Will be regularly updated by me.etymology, philosophy, laconic, disharmony, patriarchic, archaic, phlogiston, aether, aeon, angel, arachnid, rhythm and 322 more...
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GRE Barrons Wordlist
A complete Barron's Wordlist for GRE preparation. Your online flashcard replacement.
abase, abash, abate, abbreviate, abdicate, aberrant, aberration, abet, abeyance, abhor, abject, abjure and 4084 more...
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The weird, the wonderful and the plain hilarious
Loved for their ingenuity, an exact description, or simply for the pure joy of it.
acidulous, aprosdoketon, higgledy-piggledy, lexicographical, ninja, audacious, somnabulist, shivaree, amorphous, quidnunc, glib, melancholy and 353 more...
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Rhetorical Devices
syllepsis, zeugma, trope, wellerism, anastrophe, anaphora, apostrophe, metonymy, chiasmus, antimetabole, syncope, open-list and 431 more...
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Wordplay & Pun
wordplay, pound, conceit, clinch, joke, quibble, equivoque, double-entendre, quillet, calembour, carriwitchet, paranomasia and 89 more...
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Logolepsy
"Luciferous Logolepsy is a collection of over 9,000 obscure English words. Though the definition of an 'English' word might seem to be straightforward, it is not. There exist so many adopted, deriv...
Anschauung, Areopagus, Argus, Briarean, Dei gratia, Dei judicium, Deo volente, Duecento, Foehn, Geflugelte Worte, Gegenschein, Hakenkreuz and 9230 more...
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Words with Four Consecutive Vowels
This oughta be a short list, eh?
queue, queuing, homoiousian, miaou, onomatopoeia, hawaiian, iroquoian, kauai, kilauea, longueuil, louie, montesquieu and 58 more...
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Words that make you stupid
Words that don't get along well with human anatonomy and might cause severe damage to the reader.
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Words with unusual spellings or pronunciations
Herein are listed words with oddball spellings and words whose pronunciation does not reflect the spelling.
eleemosynary, Wednesday, colonel, posslq, zaqqum, qwerty, cinquefoil, qibla(h), minuscule, Cholmondeley, polyphloisboian, ptisan and 67 more...
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Linguistic Terms
Words that (mostly) only linguists know.
arpabet, protologism, diacritic, macron, macaronic, capitonym, grapheme, boustrophedon, allograph, analphabetic, idiomatic, portmanteau and 39 more...
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Talking About Words
The favorite words of Talking Tyrants
dolorous, parsimonious, apotemnophilia, odalisque, tuberoinfundibular, morass, ostentatious, sybaritic, vermilion, onomatopoeia, eschatology, teleology and 49 more...
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Bodily
wigwag, caprae, hylozoism, abiogenesis, whorl, entropy, anima, anthropoid, avatar, symbiont, symbiote, android and 34 more...
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Fun to Say
Oh-so-pronounceable words.
schwa, sprack, rubbly, swashbuckler, hecka, tartine, ambiguous, ghee, trapped in, abecedarius, highfalutin, dirigible and 24 more...
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Hard to Spell
Not sure I'd be able to spell these words...
camaraderie, belligerent, strategem, hippopotomonstros..., epitome, accommodate, subtle, sacrilegious, ambivalent, wookiee, onomatopoeia, idiosyncrasy and 3 more...
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Poetry Terms
April is National Poetry Month. Add your favorite poetry terms to this new list!
alliteration, anapest, alexandrine, caesura, assonance, ballad, blank verse, iamb, conceit, couplet, consonance, dactyl and 22 more...
curtainup A lesson on this word is not something you'd expect to find in a comic marital drama-- yet, that's exactly what happens in Lucinda Coxon's Happy Now? in whih the main character's husband is a lawyer-turned English teacher who cares deeply about word use and punctuation-- a quick recap of student submission of Onomatopoeia examples like bang, crash and wallop (which he questions)-- he moves on to the well-placed comma. For more about the play seem my review at www.curtainup.com/happynow10.html Feb 11, 2010
rooma how do i find an ono-- of a word in here,please?
Oct 22, 2009
she Personally, onomatopoeia became very easy to spell once I imagined it as
O no, 'mato! Poe-i-a
(has a hellomoto sort of ring to it; 'mato as in tomato, Poe as in Edgar Allen-) Jul 11, 2008
oroboros The longest common word containing only four consonants.
--Will Shortz's intro to "Wordplay: A curious dictionary of language oddities" by Chris Cole. May 16, 2008
frindley If onomatopoeia is using words that imitate the sound they denote, then what is the word for words that make you look like the appearance they denote when you say them, e.g. moue, that special kind of disdainful French pout.
Mar 31, 2008
bug I love the sound of this word. It makes me think of a gangster talking to someone gagged and tied on the floor....."Whatsa matta with you a? ona mata pee-ya!
Okay, I know it's dumb, but it makes me chuckle every time I think about the word. Dec 27, 2007
bilby Greek catch-all for short stories about wayward pulses. Derived from the genre classic which begins: "On a mat a pea, a lentil and a foppish adzuki sat swigging rumble juice." Nov 22, 2007
skipvia Also the name of a rather grisly Marvel Comics villain. His only utterances are onomatopoeias.
Try it sometime. Oct 10, 2007
dlarson A friend in elementary school told me a way to remember how to spell this and I never forgot it:
O No Ma! Topo E-I-A!
haha May 10, 2007