Ideophone

Ideophones are words that evoke a vivid impression of certain sensations or sensory perceptions, e.g. sound, movement, color, shape, or action. Ideophones are found in many of the world's languages, though they are relatively uncommon in Western languages (Nuckolls 2004). The word class of ideophones is sometimes called phonosemantic to indicate that it is not a grammatical word class in the traditional sense of the word (like 'verb' or 'noun'), but rather a lexical class based on the special relation between form and meaning exhibited by ideophones. In the discipline of linguistics, ideophones have long been overlooked or treated as mysterious words (Voeltz and Kilian-Hatz 2001:2), though a recent surge of interest in sound symbolism, iconicity and linguistic diversity has brought them renewed attention (Imai et al. 2008, Güldemann 2008, Gasser et al. 2010, Nuckolls 1996).