The word snoop - Ursula Dubosarsky 2009

Onomatopoeia
Say that again!

WOW! That’s a hard word! Ono-mato-pee-a. Hmm. Actually, you probably use onomatopoeia every day. Like when you crunch on a very juicy apple and slurpas you lick all the juice from your face, or listen for the brrring of the bell when school’s over (at last!).

The word onomatopoeia comes from ancient Greek. Onomameans “name,” and poeia means “making.” Onomatopoeia is when you use a name or word that makes the sound of something, or at least suggests it somehow. For an easy example, remember the fights in Batman? POW! WHAM! SMASH! That’s onomatopoeia. Comic-book writers love it. In fact, there’s even an evil comic-book character called Onomatopoeia, who gets his name by imitating sounds, like the dripping of a faucet or a gun going off. (Keep away from him!)

The words for animal sounds often use onomatopoeia, like moo for a cow, or quack for a duck. But the funny thing is, even though animals sound much the same all over the world, people who speak different languages make up different words for the sounds animals make. So, for example, in English a pig goes oink oink,but in Chinese it’s hu lu,in Croatian it’s rok rok,and in Portuguese croinh croinh.An Indonesian dog goes gong gong,a Russian dog gav gav,and an Albanian dog hum hum.Try that out next time you sing “Old Macdonald Had a Farm!”

And it’s not just the animals. If you’re in Japan and someone cracks a joke, make sure you don’t say “ha ha ha,” because in Japan it’s hu hu hu.Or if you’re in Poland and you feel a big sneeze coming on, don’t say “aah-choo!” when you sneeze, say apsik!And luckily when the Word Snoop was in Bulgaria last summer and someone stepped on her toe, she remembered just in time to cry out “Ox!”

Poets are especially fond of onomatopoeia, where the sounds and the meanings of words go together. What do you think the writer Edgar Allan Poe, famous for his scary stories and poems, was talking about here?

“How they tinkle, tinkle, tinkle,

In the icy air of night!”

(No, not daggers—think ding dong . . .)

In The Giants and the Joneses by Julia Donaldson, the giants speak a language that the author made up herself called “Groilish,” with words like heehuckerly for “funny” and glishglursh for “splash.” And in Roald Dahl’s The BFG (yes, that’s an acronym), there are words like frobscottle and trogglehumpers. What do you think they could mean?

You could make up some words like this. It could be giants talking, or it could just be based on something ordinary, like a ride on a tram or a train or a bus. To give you an idea, ask your grandparents or a VERY old teacher if they can sing you “The Trolley Song,” made famous by the singer Judy Garland. It’s got clangs and dings and zings and chugsand bumpsand buzzesas well.

In the meantime, see if you can work out what the onomatopoeic words on the opposite page could be.

Onomatopoeia

1. A game you play with two bats and a lightweight ball across a table. (Don’t hit too hard!)

2. The sound a snake makes. (Leave the room very quickly when you hear this sound.)

3. A bird you might find in a wooden clock. (Not exactly alive.)

4. When you talk in a very low voice. (As you always should. Ha ha! Or should I say hu hu?)