Onomatopoeia
//ˌɒnəˌmætəˈpiːə// noun
noun ·Uncommon ·College level
Definitions
Noun
- 1 The property of a word that sounds like what it represents. uncountable
"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 using words that imitate the sound they denote wordnet
- 3 A word that sounds like what it represents, such as "gurgle", "stutter", or "hiss". countable
- 4 A word that sounds like what it represents, such as "gurgle", "stutter", or "hiss".; A word that appropriates a sound for another sensation or a perceived nature, such as "thud", "beep", or "meow"; an ideophone, phenomime. countable
- 5 The use of language whose sound imitates that which it names. rhetoric, uncountable
Example
More examples"Some of the onomatopoeia in Japanese make no sense to me."
Etymology
Borrowed from Latin onomatopoeïa, 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”). By surface analysis, onomato- + -poeia.
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.