Question

What is a poetic device used to imitate natural sound?

Answer 1

Hint: The act of generating a term that phonetically imitates, mimics, or implies the sound it describes is known as onomatopoeia. An onomatopoeia is a word that sounds like something else.

Complete answer:
A term that imitates a thing's inherent sounds is known as onomatopoeia. It produces a sound effect that resembles the stated object, making the description more expressive and engaging. Animal noises like oink, meow, roar, and chirp are common onomatopoeias. The sound of a clock may be represented as tick-tock in English, tic tac in Spanish and Italian, dī dā in Mandarin, katchin - katchin in Japanese, or tik-tik in Hindi. Onomatopoeia can vary between languages: it adheres to some extent to the wider linguistic system.

“The gushing stream runs in the forest,” for example, is a more meaningful description than just “The stream flows in the forest,” since the reader is drawn to hear the sound of a “gushing stream,” which makes the statement more effective.

Many onomatopoeic words have evolved their own meanings in addition to the sounds they represent. For example, the word "whisper" denotes both the wispy or breathy sound of people conversing gently and the activity of individuals conversing quietly.

Some examples of onomatopoeia:
- The humming bee took off.
- With a splash, the sack landed in the river.
- With a loud thump, the books landed on the table.

Note: Because they represent diverse sounds of the same item, onomatopoeic words appear in groups. Plop, splash, gush, sprinkle, drizzle, and drip, for example, are a set of terms that represent distinct water sounds. Growl, laugh, grunt, mutter, blurt, and chatter are all terms that describe distinct types of human vocal sounds.