For the ringing of sleigh bells, Poe's "The Bells" uses "tintinnabulation". A word that imitates the sound it names, like "buzz" or "zip" in the Cambridge Dictionary entry, is onomatopoeia.
Onomatopoeia Words by What Makes the Sound
| Sound source | Words |
|---|---|
| Animals | woof, meow, purr, moo, oink, baa, neigh, quack, cluck, cock-a-doodle-doo, hoot, chirp, caw, cuckoo, buzz, ribbit |
| Water | splash, drip, plop, gurgle, slosh, glug, burble |
| Collisions and impacts | bang, crash, thud, thump, clang, clank, clatter, boom, kaboom, kerplunk, clunk, crunch, splat, wham, whack, thwack, bonk |
| Air and wind | whoosh, swoosh, whiz, whir, zoom, rustle, swish |
| Machines and vehicles | vroom, beep, honk, toot, chug, choo-choo, put-put, ticktock, clickety-clack, ding-dong, zap, click |
| Voice and body | achoo, ahem, burp, hiccup, gulp, slurp, chomp, mumble, murmur, giggle, grunt, shush |
| Quiet sounds | hush, whisper, tinkle, patter, pitter-patter, creak, squeak, fizz, hum |
Some of these copy a sound closely (hiccup, cuckoo, ding-dong). Others only suggest it: murmur and whisper are soft words for soft sounds, but nobody whispers "whisper". Both kinds count.
Comic-Book Sound Effects
Comics print the sound as a picture, in letters as big as the punch. Seven, with the character or show each belongs to:
- THWIP: Spider-Man's web-shooters, which started out as a "WHIZZZZZT" in his first appearance, Amazing Fantasy #15 in 1962.
- SNIKT: Wolverine's claws coming out.
- BAMF: Nightcrawler of the X-Men, teleporting.
- POW, BAM and ZONK: three of the words flashed across the fight scenes of the 1966–68 Batman TV series.
- WHAAM!: the title of Roy Lichtenstein's 1963 painting, copied from a war comic panel of a fighter plane exploding.
Drafting a story of your own? Draft scenes from your outline in Sudowrite, an AI writing tool built for fiction that keeps a story bible of your characters. Free trial, no card needed. (affiliate link)
A Dog's Bark and a Rooster's Crow in Other Languages
Onomatopoeia imitates a sound through the sounds a language has, so the same dog barks differently around the world. From Wikipedia's table of cross-linguistic onomatopoeias:
| Language | Dog | Rooster |
|---|---|---|
| English | woof, bow wow | cock-a-doodle-doo |
| French | ouah ouah | cocorico |
| German | wau wau | kikeriki |
| Spanish | guau guau | quiquiriquí |
| Italian | bau bau | chicchirichi |
| Russian | gav gav | ku-ka-re-ku |
| Polish | hau hau | kukuryku |
| Japanese | wan wan | kokekokkō |
| Korean | meong meong | – |
| Mandarin Chinese | wāng wāng | – |
| Hindi | bhau bhau | – |
| Turkish | hav hav | – |
Russian, the same source notes, has a second bark for small dogs: tyaf tyaf. If your story is set abroad, a local animal sound is an exact piece of setting.
Onomatopoeia in Poetry
"How they tinkle, tinkle, tinkle, / In their icy air of night!"
Edgar Allan Poe, "The Bells", in The Complete Poetical Works, part 1: silver sleigh bells.
"To the tintinnabulation that so musically wells / From the bells, bells, bells, bells, / Bells, bells, bells-- / From the jingling and the tinkling of the bells."
"The Bells", part 1, the lines that end the section.
"How they clang, and clash, and roar!"
"The Bells", part 3. The alarm bells are brass, and the words get harder.
"To the moaning and the groaning of the bells."
"The Bells", part 4, the iron funeral bells and the poem's last line. Across four parts, Poe moves from tinkle to groan, and the words for the bells change with them, from a sleigh ride to a funeral.
"While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping, / As of some one gently rapping--rapping at my chamber door."
Poe, "The Raven", stanza 1.
"And bubbling and troubling and doubling, / And grumbling and rumbling and tumbling, / And chattering and battering and shattering;"
Robert Southey, "The Cataract of Lodore", in Elson Grammar School Literature, Book Four. The whole poem is a waterfall made of sound words.
"And thumping and plumping and bumping and jumping. / And dashing and flashing and splashing and clashing;"
"The Cataract of Lodore", near the end.
"The ice was here, the ice was there, / The ice was all around: / It cracked and growled, and roared and howled, / Like noises in a swound!"
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Part 1. Pack ice around the ship.
"Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft / The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft; / And gathering swallows twitter in the skies."
John Keats, "To Autumn", in Poems Published in 1820, the poem's last lines.
"The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine, / The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves."
Keats, "Ode to a Nightingale", in the same book. "Murmurous" hums the way the flies do.
"I chatter over stony ways, / In little sharps and trebles, / I bubble into eddying bays, / I babble on the pebbles."
Alfred Tennyson, "The Brook", in Maud, and Other Poems. The brook narrates itself in its own noises.
"A tap at the pane, the quick sharp scratch / And blue spurt of a lighted match,"
Robert Browning, "Meeting at Night", in Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning. A knock and a match being struck, in two lines.
"The blab of the pave, tires of carts, sluff of boot-soles, talk of the promenaders,"
Walt Whitman, "Song of Myself", section 8, in Leaves of Grass.
"The ring of alarm-bells, the cry of fire, the whirr of swift-streaking engines and hose-carts with premonitory tinkles and color’d lights,"
"Song of Myself", section 26. A city fire call, all of it noise.
"I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world."
"Song of Myself", section 52.
"I heard a fly buzz when I died;"
Emily Dickinson, in Poems, Three Series. The buzz comes back at the end of the poem, the last thing the speaker hears.
"One, two! One, two! And through and through / The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!"
Lewis Carroll, "Jabberwocky", in Through the Looking-Glass, Chapter 1. "Snicker-snack" is Carroll's own invention, and you hear the blade anyway.
"Came whiffling through the tulgey wood, / And burbled as it came!"
"Jabberwocky" again.
"Can't you 'ear their paddles chunkin' from Rangoon to Mandalay?"
Rudyard Kipling, "Mandalay", in Barrack-Room Ballads.
"We’re foot--slog--slog--slog--sloggin’ over Africa! / Foot--foot--foot--foot--sloggin’ over Africa-- / (Boots--boots--boots--boots, movin’ up and down again!)"
Kipling, "Boots", in The Five Nations. The words keep the beat of marching feet, and the poem never lets it stop.
"Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle / Can patter out their hasty orisons."
Wilfred Owen, "Anthem for Doomed Youth", in his Poems. Rifle fire as the only prayer said for the dead.
"If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood / Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs"
Owen, "Dulce et Decorum est". A soldier dying after a gas attack.
"The buzz-saw snarled and rattled in the yard"
Robert Frost, "Out, Out—", in Mountain Interval, the first line. The same two verbs come back a few lines later, before the accident.
Onomatopoeia in Plays and Prose
"Bow-wow. / The watch dogs bark."
William Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act 1, Scene 2, from Ariel's song.
"Hark, hark! I hear / The strain of strutting chanticleer / Cry cock-a-diddle-dow."
The Tempest, the same song. Shakespeare's rooster crows a little differently from ours.
"Knock, knock, knock. Who’s there, i’ th’ name of Belzebub?"
Macbeth, Act 2, Scene 3. The drunk Porter answers the gate just after the murder, and the knocking goes on through the scene.
"Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal."
King James Bible, 1 Corinthians 13:1.
"Clash, clang, hammer; ding, dong, bell. Bell, dong, ding; hammer, clang, clash! Oh, glorious, glorious!"
Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol, Stave 5. Scrooge wakes to the church bells on Christmas morning, and the sound words run forwards and then backwards.
"Crish, crash! there goes the jib-stay! Blang-whang! God! Duck lower, Pip, here comes the royal yard!"
Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, Chapter 40. Pip, terrified, during a squall.
"a positive tramp, tramp, a metallic clatter, which effaced the soft wave-wanderings;"
Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, Chapter 12. Rochester's horse on the frozen lane, heard before Jane sees him.
"there was a crack, a crash, and a close rattling peal;"
Jane Eyre, Chapter 23. The storm the night of the proposal.
"the growling thunder, and the great drops that began to plash around her"
Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights, Chapter 9.
"Set her back on the stabboard! Ting-a-ling-ling! Chow! ch-chow-wow! Chow!"
Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Chapter 2. Ben Rogers, playing a steamboat: the bell, then the paddle wheels.
"I could hear his stick go tap-tap-tapping into the distance."
Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island, Chapter 3. Blind Pew leaving the inn.
"‘Humph!’ said the Camel; and the Horse went away and told the Man."
Kipling, "How the Camel Got His Hump", in Just So Stories. The grunt turns into the hump by the end of the story.
"The hard brown beetles kept thudding against the dull light,"
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, Chapter 8.
Writing Sound Into a Scene
- Put the noise inside a sentence. Stevenson's stick goes "tap-tap-tapping" in the middle of an ordinary sentence (No. 34), and the story never stops for it.
- Let the noise arrive first. In Nos. 26 and 30 the character hears something before seeing what made it, and the reader waits with them.
- Keep it to one or two words. Southey can spend a whole poem on a waterfall's noise; in a novel, a single "plash" or "clatter" in the right sentence can do the job.
Owen's "rifles' rapid rattle" is onomatopoeia and alliteration at once. Simile, metaphor and the other comparisons are collected in the figurative language examples.
Onomatopoeia FAQ
How do you pronounce onomatopoeia?
ON-uh-mat-uh-PEE-uh, six syllables.
Can a name be onomatopoeia?
Yes. The cuckoo is named after its call, and so is the chickadee.
