Wednesday Words (6)

Each Wednesday I present to you a loveable word and what it means. These are words that look or sound pleasing. This week I bring to you…

Onomatopoeia.

Jim Newton-Smith (among others!) suggested this word to me. It is a famously hard-to-spell descriptor, meaning words that imitate the sound of what they are trying to describe. “BANG!” for example, or “fizz”. It comes froma  Greek compound word meaning “name-making” or “word-making”, via Latin into our 16th-century vocabulary.

When I asked people to suggest loveable words to me, not only did several people mention “onomatopoeia”, but many others suggested words that were themselves onomatopoetic. Lauren Francis, for example, suggested slosh, plink and whoosh, all of which are excellent and lovely. I am personally quite partial to splat.