An onomatopoeia or onomatopœia, from the Greek for name and for I make, 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 universally 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 and tik tak in Dutch.
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 in honk 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,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, or blet with the vowel drawled, which is much more accurate as onomatopoeia than the modern pronunciation.
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