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phonaesthesia

noun

Etymology

Apparently coined by British linguist John Rupert Firth. From phon- + -aesthesia.

Definitions

  1. Any correspondence between the sound of a word and its meaning

    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’.
    • Phonaesthesia refers to the vaguer phenomenon whereby families of words with shared phonemes sometimes evoke related meanings in a not-quite-echoic manner.

The neighborhood

Vish — recursive loop

No curated loop yet for phonaesthesia. Loops are being traced one word at a time while the ingestion pipeline matures.

sense glosses and etymology drawn from English Wiktionary · source · CC-BY-SA