Sizzle. Zipper. Crash. Hiccup. Boom.

What do all these words have in common? Besides being a chronological description of my most recent date, they are all examples of onomatopoeia, the subject of today’s post here on Funtymology.

As you may already know, onomatopoetic words are those whose phonology resembles their referent: the sound of the word mimics the sound typically associated with the object the word represents. In addition to the words listed above, familiar examples of onomatopoeia are found in the words for animal noises — oink, chirp, bark, etc. — which, intriguingly, vary from culture to culture. While an English frog makes a croak, its Ancient Greek equivalent belches forth koax koax.

Speaking of Ancient Greek, that is the etymological source for today’s word. Onoma (genitive form: onomatos) means ‘word’, and poein, ‘to make’ or ‘to create’, which combine to form onomatopoiia, or ‘the making of a word’. (Latin borrows the word from Greek, changing the spelling to onomatopoeia, which English then takes over.)

Wikipedia suggests that onomatopoiia, in Ancient Greek,refers to the general process by which a word comes into use, and, unlike the English onomatopoeia, does not connote anything about the resemblance of the sound of the word to the sound of its object. But a passage from the 1st century BCE author Strabo seems to contradict this claim. Speaking of his fellow speakers of ancient Greek, he writes:

We are by nature very much inclined to denote sounds by words that sound like them, on account of their homogeneity. For this reason, examples of onomatopoeia (onomatopoiiai) abound in our language, as, for example, kelaruzein and also klange, psophos, boe, and krotos,

Here Strabo seems to use the word onomatopoiia in exactly the same sense as the English onomatopoeia: to pick out words whose sound matches the sound made by the word’s referent. And we also see in this passage the phenomenon of cultural variation in choosing the particular form an onomatopoetic word takes. On Strabo’s list are kelurazein (English: babble or gurgle), klange (English: clang), psophos (English: knock). boe (English: roar), and krotos (English: rattle).

Yours in amateur etymology,

SS