Onomatopoeia examples
Words that sound like the thing they name. A hundred of them below, grouped by source, and the harder question of which one to reach for.
What it is, and the problem with it
Onomatopoeia is a word that imitates the sound it names. Buzz, hiss, clatter, splash. English has hundreds and most of them are worn so far into ordinary speech that you stop hearing them as imitation, which is why the word crash passes unnoticed until somebody points at it.
It is also the first literary device most people are taught, at about seven, alongside a worksheet. That is the difficulty for a novelist, because the device carries a faint smell of the classroom and a writer who has been told once that sound words are childish tends to avoid them for the rest of their working life, which costs more than the occasional creaking gate ever did.
So the list below is the easy half. The section after it matters more, because a hundred sound words are no use at all to a writer who reaches for the same six that everybody else reaches for, and the difference between a page that reads young and one that does not turns out to live entirely in that choice.
100 onomatopoeia examples, grouped by what makes the noise
Grouped by source rather than alphabetically, because a writer arrives needing a noise for a particular thing rather than a word beginning with a particular letter. For onomatopoeia examples in sentences, the five passages below are the useful half.
- Water
- splash, drip, plop, gurgle, slosh, trickle, glug, spatter, gush
- Impact
- thud, thump, bang, crash, smack, whack, clatter, clunk, wallop, crack, slap
- Metal
- clang, clink, jangle, chink, ping, clank, rattle, screech, twang
- Wind and air
- whoosh, whistle, sigh, moan, howl, whirr, rustle
- Fire and cooking
- crackle, sizzle, hiss, pop, spit, fizz, roar, bubble
- Animals
- buzz, growl, yelp, bark, chirp, caw, croak, bleat, cluck, hoot, purr, snarl, squeak, twitter
- The human voice
- mutter, murmur, mumble, groan, grunt, gasp, sob, giggle, snort, hiccup, wheeze, chatter
- Doors and hinges
- creak, squeak, slam, click, clack, groan, rattle
- Footsteps
- patter, clomp, scuff, crunch
- Machinery
- hum, whirr, chug, throb, tick, judder, whine
- Paper and cloth
- rustle, crinkle, swish, flap, ruffle, crackle
- Small and sharp
- snap, tick, ping, pop, zip, clip
A hundred entries and ninety-one distinct words, because nine belong in two places. Crackle is fire and it is paper, and which one a reader hears depends on the noun standing next to it. Words like shuffle and drizzle are deliberately absent: they name a motion rather than imitate a sound, and half the lists online treat them as the same thing.
Five passages that use it without sounding like a worksheet
Onomatopoeia in a sentence, five times, from novels you can check. Each puts several sound words into one line. None reads as a lesson.
1Sound instead of silence
Three noises and a fourth plain word, used to establish that there is nothing else to hear.
The frame is the trick. Wells opens with heard nothing but, so each sound that follows measures an absence rather than filling the air. Crackling, rustle, throb, with his own breathing among them carrying no imitation at all. The list ends inside his ears, and by then the only thing still making a noise is him. Three sound words in a sentence should be too many. They are not, because the sentence is counting down.
Try this. Find a quiet moment in your draft and give it two sounds and nothing else. The quiet will read as quieter than any sentence saying so.
For some way I heard nothing but the crackling twigs under my feet, the faint rustle of the breeze above, and my own breathing and the throb of the blood-vessels in my ears.
2A cannonball, in three sounds
A roar, a whistle, and a specific verb for the landing.
Roar and whistle are the ordinary words and they track the shot through the air. Plumped is the one that matters. It is an old English word for a heavy sudden fall rather than anything Stevenson invented, and it does what landed cannot: it gives the drop a weight and a dull sound at once. He takes the common words for the part a reader can picture and the precise one for the part they cannot see, which is far beyond us in the wood.
Try this. Find a noise in your draft rendered with the obvious word. Look for an older, narrower one that says how the thing ended as well as how it sounded.
Just then, with a roar and a whistle, a round-shot passed high above the roof of the log-house and plumped far beyond us in the wood.
3Two sounds, one summer
A noise given a modifier that belongs to the light rather than to the ear.
Sunny gurgle is the move. Gurgle is the sound word and sunny is doing what a sound word cannot, which is to put a temperature and a light on it. Cather does not do it twice: singsong buzz is a sound described in sound terms and is the ordinary half of the sentence. Note also that she opens on the same frame Wells uses, no sound but, so two of the five specimens reach for it. It is the commonest good idea on this page.
Try this. Take a sound word and put an adjective in front of it that belongs to sight, temperature or taste. Keep it only if the pairing surprises you.
There was no sound but the high, singsong buzz of wild bees and the sunny gurgle of the water underneath.
4Rhythm carrying the fear
A small accurate sound for a thing the narrator has not identified.
These things are arrows, and Marlow does not know that yet. Patter is acoustically right, because that is what arrows striking a wooden pilot-house sound like, and the ignorance is carried by these things rather than by the noise. Conrad gives the reader the narrator's vocabulary rather than the author's, so we work out what is happening a beat before the man telling the story does.
Try this. Take a threat your viewpoint character has not identified, and name it with the words they have. Keep the sound accurate and let the noun carry what they do not know.
I could only hear the heavy splashing thump of the stern-wheel and the patter of these things.
5Sound and simile together
A noise chosen so that the simile after it is already half made.
Hissing is the noise a snake makes and it is also what surf does, so it is accurate and load-bearing at the same time. Melville lets it prime the comparison, and nine words later the crests are serpents. Booming carries the boat and hissing carries the water, and the second one was chosen knowing what the sentence would do with it.
Try this. Look for a sound word that names something as well as a noise. Hiss, growl, bark, caw. See whether the sentence wants the second meaning.
Meanwhile the boat was still booming through the mist, the waves curling and hissing around us like the erected crests of enraged serpents.
The problem is not the device
Every passage above carries three or four sound words in a single sentence. None of them reads young. The warning you usually get about this device, that it belongs to children's books, is aimed at the wrong thing.
What makes a page read young is reaching for the first sound word that fits. Creaking gates. Crunching gravel. A barking dog. Each is correct and each is the one anybody would produce, and a paragraph built out of them describes the idea of a place rather than a place, which is a cliche problem wearing a sound word's clothes and would read the same way rendered as a simile.
The five sentences above avoid it in five ways: a frame that turns noise into silence, a narrow verb, a modifier from outside hearing, a sound belonging to the character's vocabulary rather than the author's, and a noise chosen because of the simile it will let the sentence make. Only one of the five is about using fewer words, and none of them is about restraint.
Two habits do genuinely give a page away, and neither is frequency. Comic-book spelling, where a noise is stretched across a line in italics. And sound words inside dialogue tags, which is a separate problem covered under dialogue tags.
Children's writing is the exception to none of this. Picture books carry more sound words because they are read aloud, and the good ones still avoid the obvious choice.
A noisy paragraph with an editor on it
Every sound word below is correctly used. The paragraph still does not work.
Drag to compare original and revised text
Elena is one of the Prosematter editors. Sound-word density is a line-level note, and it is a common one.
Questions & Answers
- What does onomatopoeia mean?
- The definition of onomatopoeia is a word that imitates the sound it names. Buzz. Hiss. Clang. Splash. English has a few hundred, and most are worn smooth by ordinary use, which is both why they are handy and why the first one you reach for is usually the one every other writer reached for too. On the spelling, which trips more people than the meaning does: o-n-o-m-a-t-o-p-o-e-i-a.
- What is the difference between onomatopoeia and a sound word?
- None in ordinary use, and the onomatopoeia meaning most dictionaries give covers both. It matters only at the edges of a list like the one above, where words such as shuffle and drizzle get included because they describe noisy things. They name a motion rather than imitate a noise, so they are not onomatopoeia and they are not here.
- What are 10 examples of onomatopoeia?
- Buzz, hiss, clang, splash, crunch, whoosh, thud, creak, sizzle and murmur. The table above groups a hundred and ten entries by what makes the noise, which is a faster way to find the one you want, because a writer arrives needing a sound for a particular object rather than a word starting with a particular letter.
- Can you give me 100 examples of onomatopoeia?
- The table above has a hundred and ten, in twelve groups: water, impact, metal, wind, fire, animals, the human voice, doors, footsteps, machinery, paper and cloth, and small sharp noises. A few words appear in two groups because the noun beside them decides which sound a reader hears.
- What is the longest onomatopoeia word?
- Among real sound words the usual answer is a coinage rather than a dictionary entry, because the device invites invention. Pitter-patter and rat-a-tat-tat are compounds built by repeating a short sound, and comic books stretch a single noise across a whole panel. Long words like honorificabilitudinitatibus get offered as an answer and are not onomatopoeia at all.
- How do you explain onomatopoeia to a child?
- Say the word sounds like the thing. Ask what a door does when it opens slowly, or what rain does on a window, and write down the word they say. They will produce creak and patter without being told, because the words were built that way in the first place and a child hears that before anyone explains it.
Sound-word density is a line edit note
It sits with repetition, filter words and dead metaphor in the pass that works on how sentences land rather than on whether they are correct.
Read the guide to line editingAbre um capítulo. Tudo o que ele precisa já está ao lado.
O elenco, os lugares, as regras que inventaste, a nota que deixaste a ti mesmo em novembro. Nada para procurar, nada para sincronizar à mão — e sem essa fricção, os dias em que escreves começam a somar.