Onomatopoeia Examplesīecause onomatopoeia can make language so expressive, impactful, and memorable, it’s used almost everywhere you look, from literature to comics to advertising and more. But you can also just make the judgment call for yourself. It can be helpful to consult their list to get a sense of whether a specific word qualifies as onomatopoeia. The Onomatopoeia List website has collected hundreds of examples of onomatopoeic words and lets users vote on their relative onomatopoeia-ness. But other onomatopoeic words are subtler, such as the words “throbbing” and “moaning,”which appear in the Edgar Allen Poe poem “The Bells.” Does the word “moan” sound like someone moaning? Does “throb” sound like a heart beating? Kind of, but not obviously so. Some words, like “meow” and “buzz,” are clear examples of onomatopoeia because they’re like transcriptions of sound spelled out in letters. There is no definitive test for whether a word qualifies as onomatopoeia. How Can You Tell if a Word Qualifies as Onomatopoeia? Sometimes onomatopoeia involves no words at all, as in examples like “Zzzzzz” to represent the sound of sleeping or snoring, “hachoo” for a sneezing sound, or “tsk-tsk” or “tut-tut” to convey the scolding sound we make to express disapproval. A Series of Letters that Mimic a Raw Sound For example, when James Joyce needed a word to convey the sound of someone knocking on a door, he invented “tattarrattat.” Today, almost a hundred years after he coined it in writing his novel Ulysses, “tattarrattat” has become a legit word (it’s in the Oxford English Dictionary). Made-up words can fill the void when no word exists to sufficiently capture the nuances of a real-world sound. Made-up Words that Sound Like Real Things Perhaps the most famous example of this type of onomatopoeia is Edgar Allen Poe’s poem “The Bells,” in which Poe repeats the word “bell” 62 times to evoke the sound of a bell ringing and tolling, even though the word “bell” itself does not itself sound like a bell ringing. In this rarer type of onomatopoeia, a word or series of words is used to imitate a real-world sound, even though the words used don’t mimic that sound themselves. Real Words Made to Evoke the Sound of Real Things This is by far the most common type of onomatopoeia. The word “meow,” which sounds just like the sound a cat makes when it actually meows, is a classic example of conventional onomatopoeia. This type of onomatopoeia, which we’ll call conventional onomatopoeia, uses words whose own sound evokes the sound of real things.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |