Words That Are Surprisingly Named After Sounds

Linguist Patrick Foote of Name Explain talked about common English words with onomatopoeic roots and the sounds used to name them. Some of these words are quite obvious to spot.

Think of a sound a balloon makes when it explodes. Instead of coining a whole new word for it, we can just imitate the sound it made and use that as a word. In this case, pop. Pop is one of the most obvious onomatopoeic words out there along the likes of boom, crash, cough, and the many words we use to make the sounds animals make.

Other words have surprising onomatopoeic roots. These words include owl, pebble, barbarian, outro, bloopers, orkney, and cliché.

In most cases, we can spot a word that’s onomatopoeic from a mile away. But this isn’t always the case. There’s actually a selection of words which come from onomatopoeic roots that have strayed quite far from the sounds they were initially named after.