Pronunciation (US) (help·info), from the Greek ὀνοματοποιία;[1] ὄνομα for "name"

Onomatopoeia

An onomatopoeia or onomatopœia (  pronunciation (US) (help·info), from the Greek ὀνοματοποιία;^[1] ὄνομα for "name"^[2] and ποιέω for "I make",^[3] adjectival form: "onomatopoeic" or "onomatopoetic") is a word that imitates or suggests the source of the sound that it describes.Onomatopoeia (as an uncountable noun) refers to the property of such words. Common occurrences of onomatopoeias include animal noises, such as "oink" or "meow" or "roar". Onomatopoeias are not the same across all languages; they conform to some extent to the broader linguistic system they are part of; hence the sound of a clock may be tick tock in English, dī dā in Mandarin, or katchin katchin inJapanese. Cross-linguistic examples

Main article: Cross-linguistic onomatopoeias

Uses of onomatopoeia

In the case of a frog croaking, the spelling may vary because different frog species around the world make different sounds: Ancient Greek brekekekex koax koax (only in Aristophanes' comic play The Frogs) for probably marsh frogs; English ribbit for species of frog found in North America; English verb "croak" for the common frog. Related to this is the use of tibbir for the toad.
Some other very common English-language examples include hiccup, zoom, bang, beep, and splash. Machines and their sounds are also often described with onomatopoeia, as inhonk or beep-beep for the horn of an automobile, and vroom or brum for the engine. When someone speaks of a mishap involving an audible arcing of electricity, the word "zap" is often used (and has been subsequently expanded and used to non-auditory effects generally connoting the same sort of localized but thorough interference or destruction similar to produced in short-circuit sparking).
For animal sounds, words like quack (duck), bark (dog), roar (lion) and meow (cat) are typically used in English. Some of these words are used both as nouns and as verbs.
Agglutinative languages or synthetic languages flexibly integrate onomatopoeic words into their structure. This may evolve into a new word, up to the point that it is no longer recognized as onomatopoeia. One example is English "bleat" for the sheep noise: in medieval times it was pronounced approximately as "blairt" (but without an R-component), or "blet" with the vowel drawled, which is much more accurate as onomatopoeia than the modern pronunciation.
An example of the opposite case is "cuckoo", which, due to continuous familiarity with the bird noise down the centuries, has kept approximately the same pronunciation as in Anglo-Saxon times and its vowels have not changed to as in "furrow".
Verba dicendi are a method of integrating onomatopoeia and ideophones into grammar.
Sometimes things are named from the sounds they make. In English, for example, there is the universal fastener which is named for the onomatopoeic of the sound it makes: the zip (in the UK) or zipper (in the U.S.). Many birds are named after their calls, such as the Bobwhite quail, the Weero, the Morepork, the killdeer, chickadee, the cuckoo, the chiffchaff, thewhooping crane and the whip-poor-will. In Tamil and Malayalam, the word for crow is kaakaa. This practice is especially common in certain languages such as Māori and, therefore, in names of animals borrowed from these languages.