phonaesthesia
phonaesthesia noun: any correspondence between the sound of a word and its meaning; examples include onomatopoeia and the use of phonesthemes.
Noun
phonaesthesia (uncountable)
- Any correspondence between the sound of a word and its meaning; examples include onomatopoeia and the use of phonesthemes.
- For this latter term, phonaesthesia is doubtless at work, since kring is also ‘the sound of a small bell’.1984, Laurence Picken, Musica Asiatica, volume 4, page 214
- In contrast, writers of bucolic dialogues, like George Meriton, for instance, and lively song-writers like Robert Anderson in Cumberland, seem drawn to expressive lexis, marked by sound patterns of reduplication, alliteration and phonaesthesia.2010, Katie Wales, “Northern English in Writing”, in Raymond Hickey, editor, Varieties of English in Writing: The written word as linguistic evidence, page 74
- Synonyms:
- sound symbolism
Synonyms of phonaesthesia
Forms of phonaesthesia
| alternative form | phonesthesia |
|---|
Origin of phonaesthesia
Apparently coined by British linguist John Rupert Firth. From phon- + -aesthesia.
Words formed from phonaesthesia
Questions about phonaesthesia
- What does phonaesthesia mean?
- Phonaesthesia means any correspondence between the sound of a word and its meaning; examples include onomatopoeia and the use of phonesthemes.
- What part of speech is phonaesthesia?
- Phonaesthesia is a noun.
Words near phonaesthesia in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: phonaesthesia (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.
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Cite this entry: “phonaesthesia.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/phonaesthesia. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.