Onomatopoeia

This article is about the category of words. For other uses, see Onomatopoeia (disambiguation).

Onomatopoeia is a type of word, or the process of creating a word, that phonetically imitates, resembles, or suggests a sound that it refers to. Common onomatopoeias in English include animal noises such as oink, meow, roar, and chirp, among various other noise-based verbs and nouns such as beep, simmer, or hiccup. Among the many words that likely began as onomatopoeias but whose original expressive iconicity goes unrecognized by modern speakers, examples include fanfare, pigeon, and cough.

Onomatopoeia tends to differ by language: it conforms to the broader linguistic system (conforming to its particular phonetic rules. Hence, the sound of a clock may be expressed variously across languages: as tick tock in English, tic tac in Spanish and Italian (see photo), dī dā in Mandarin, kachi kachi in Japanese, or ṭik-ṭik in Hindi, Urdu, and Bengali.

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