Onomatopoeia Examples

Onomatopoeia is a most complex word to describe words that are self explanatory. Kids love onomatopoeic words, which are used extensively in story telling for young children. Learning words is easy if you use imitative words (onomatopoeia) when you read to your children. The words do not need to be explained as the clip-clop of a horse, the huff and puff of the wolf or the hiss of a snake requires little in the way of elaboration.

Ding dong

Nor do you need to tell your children the meaning of the word ‘vroom’ when telling them of a car when it roars off into the distance. Christmas is a good time for onomatopoeia use and bringing reality to the festivities with ‘jingle’ bells and ‘ding dong’ merrily on high types of songs playing morning, noon and night. Christmas books are a good source of onomatopoeic words for kids. You will greatly enhance your children’s vocabulary, in a fun way, when you employ the use of onomatopoeia as you read bedtime books and teach them interesting new words.

Onomatopoeia is the exciting part of any language and onomatopoeic words are used in all languages, but they are unique to their own specific language as they do not travel well when translated. A ‘flibbertigibbet’ (who is a flighty person who talks too much) will not translate from English too easily. To ‘witter’ is to talk at length about trivial matters. The addition of ‘t’ to the start of the word does little to change its meaning. Apologies to all ‘twitter’ fans but you are truly onomatopoeic.

Onomatopoeia words stir the imagination of all people and not just the children and new words keep arriving such as ‘bling’ and ‘tweet’ to keep us amused. Adults use plenty of onomatopes without even noticing it. Do you ‘slobber’ while you wait for your bacon as it ‘sizzles’ in the pan? Perhaps you tire of the constant ‘yatter’ at board (bored) meetings. I bet you would like to contribute to proceedings with a loud ‘whoop’ to liven it up instead of listening to all the ‘yackety-yak’. If you do so, however, you are likely to experience a ‘whoosh’ as you are removed from the building at break neck speed as you utter a ‘yelp’ of dismay.

The use of onomatopoeia strengthens words that might otherwise be forgotten. The syllables of a word might describe the sound that an animal makes, as well as the animal itself, which helps us to remember the word on two levels. Cuckoo is an example of this and a recent thesis estimated that 30% of all bird names are onomatopoeic.

But some onomatopoeia words can just describe the noise made as in ‘honk’ or ‘beep’ while others can refer to the item that makes the noise such as footwear like ‘flip-flops’ or a game such as ‘ping-pong’. Advertising uses onomatopoeia words all the time with the well known snap, crackle and pop for food and kerplunk for marble games as well as countless other interesting words. If you have had enough of this I suggest that you go off for a ‘zizz’ and a couple of ‘zzzs’.