Ideophones, or words that sound like what they mean—words whose sound evokes the sensory experience they describe, like swish or twinkle—are easier to learn than other words, a new study finds.

Splish-splash, boing, bang, thud, sparkle, and pitter-patter are all fun words to say — they also happen to sound exactly like their definition. A study published recently in the Journal of ...

Tricky enough, in fact, to land a spot in grammarian Mignon Fogarty’s “101 Troublesome Words You’ll Master in No Time” (St. Martin’s Griffin). “Noisome sounds like noisy,” Fogarty ...

And we all know that some words—like “hysterical” “ecstatic,” and “austere,” etc, even manage to look like what they describe, somehow. But what happens when language neither sounds ...

Researchers found that ideophones — words that sound like what they mean — are easier to learn than regular words. This suggests that some of our associations between sound and meaning may be ...

Ideophones are a bit like onomatopoeia (words that phonetically resembles the source of the sound they describe), except that they are used far more widely than in European languages.