It's the Word of the Day podcast for February 25th.

Today's word is Onomatopoeia, spelled O-N-O-M-A-T-O-M-A-T-O-O-E-I-A.

Anomatopoeia is a noun.

It refers to the creation of words that imitate natural sounds.

It can also refer to the words themselves, such as buzz and hiss.

Here's the word used in a sentence from the Philadelphia Inquirer.

As they began to slurp,

columns of noodles steadily streamed upward into their open jaws. The jazz soundtrack of Hiromi's Sonic Wonder playing Yes Raman was punctuated by a gurgling roar reminiscent of shopfax

inhaling shallow pools. We call it hitting the zoos,

says Daggerwald, noting the reference to Zuru-Zuru, the Anamatopoeia for slurping ramen in Japanese comics.

English speakers have only used the word onomatopoeia since the 1500s, but people have been

creating words that imitate the sounds heard around them for much longer. Chatter, for example,

dates to the 1200s. Some onomatopes, as anamanopoeic words are sometimes called, are obvious,

like fizz, jingle, toot, and pop.

But did you know that other onomatopes include bounce, tinker, and blimp?

Boom! Now you do. In fact, the presence of so many imitative words in language spawned the linguistic

bow-wow theory, which hypothesizes that language

originated in the imitating of natural sounds. While it's highly unlikely that automatopoeia

is the sole impetus for human language, it certainly made a mark, which is nothing to sneeze at.

With your word of the day, I'm Peter Sokoloski.

Visit Miriamwebster.com today for definitions, wordplay, and trending word lookups.