Word.ws English Dictionary

sound symbolism

sound symbolism noun: phonetic symbolism.

Noun

sound symbolism (countable and uncountable, plural sound symbolisms)

  1. Phonetic symbolism.
    Synonyms:
    mimologics, phonosemantics, ideophone, ideophonics, phonaesthesia, sound symbolics
  2. (more specifically) speech sound that is neither arbitrary with respect to meaning nor an onomatopoeia that imitates a real sound
  3. the property of such a sound or sequence of sounds

Synonyms of sound symbolism

Forms of sound symbolism

pluralsound symbolisms

Words formed from sound symbolism

Questions about sound symbolism

What does sound symbolism mean?
Sound symbolism means phonetic symbolism.
What part of speech is sound symbolism?
Sound symbolism is a noun.
What is the plural of sound symbolism?
The plural of sound symbolism is sound symbolisms.

Words near sound symbolism in the dictionary

  1. sound shadows
  2. sound shift
  3. sound shifts
  4. sound stage
  5. sound stages
  6. sound symbolism
  7. sound symbolisms
  8. sound system
  9. sound systems
  10. sound table
  11. sound tables

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: sound symbolism (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: “sound symbolism.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/sound_symbolism. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.