onomatopoeia

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See also: onomatopoeïa and onomatopœia

English

WOTD – 10 April 2006

Alternative forms

English Wikipedia has an article on:
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A sign in a shop window in Milan using the onomatopoeia tic tac to represent the sound of a clock

Etymology

Borrowed from Ancient Greek ὀνοματοποιία (onomatopoiía, “the coining of a word in imitation of a sound”), from ὀνοματοποιέω (onomatopoiéō, “to coin names”), from ὄνομα (ónoma, “name”) + ποιέω (poiéō, “to make, to do, to produce”).

Pronunciation

Noun

onomatopoeia (countable and uncountable, plural onomatopoeias or onomatopoeiae)

  1. (uncountable) The property of a word that sounds like what it represents.
    • 1553, Thomas Wilson, Desiderius Erasmus, Arte of Rhetorique‎, Oxford: Clarendon Press, published 1909:
      A woorde making called of the Grecians Onomatapoia, is when wee make wordes of our owne minde, such as bee derived from the nature of things.
  2. (countable) A word that sounds like what it represents, such as "gurgle", "stutter", or "hiss".
    1. (countable) A word that appropriates a sound for another sensation or a perceived nature, such as "thud", "beep", or "meow"; an ideophone, phenomime.
  3. (uncountable, rhetoric) The use of language whose sound imitates that which it names.

Synonyms

Translations

See also

Latin

Alternative forms

Etymology

From the Ancient Greek ὀνομᾰτοποιῐ́ᾱ (onomatopoiíā).

Pronunciation

Noun

onomatopoeia f (genitive onomatopoeiae); first declension

  1. (rhetoric) onomatopoeia (the forming of a word to resemble in sound the thing that it signifies)

Declension

First-declension noun.

singular plural
nominative onomatopoeia onomatopoeiae
genitive onomatopoeiae onomatopoeiārum
dative onomatopoeiae onomatopoeiīs
accusative onomatopoeiam onomatopoeiās
ablative onomatopoeiā onomatopoeiīs
vocative onomatopoeia onomatopoeiae

Descendants

References

  • “ŏnŏmătŏpoeïa”, in Charlton T. Lewis and Charles Short (1879) A Latin Dictionary, Oxford: Clarendon Press
  • ŏnŏmătŏpœĭa in Gaffiot, Félix (1934) Dictionnaire illustré latin-français, Hachette, page 1,080/2.
  • “onomatopoeia”, in Harry Thurston Peck, editor (1898), Harper's Dictionary of Classical Antiquities, New York: Harper & Brothers
  • “onomatopoeia” on page 1,250/1 of the Oxford Latin Dictionary (1st ed., 1968–82)
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