Hi this is something I've been looking for an answer to for a while now,
What I am looking for is a word that describes words that are read with a sound representative of their connotation. To my understanding this would differ from an onomatopoeia in that onomatopoeia's deal with the denotation of a word. This is hard for me to explain (also hard to google) so I am going to give some examples:
- Twinkle
- Sludge
- Bell
- Splash (this might just be an onomatopoeia)
These words sound like the things they mean when spoken without explicitly meaning their sound.
Contrast this to onomatopoeias whos meaning is only their sound:
- Bang
- Boom
- Tic
I am convinced that at some point I knew the answer to this question but I have since forgotten it.
Since I have tagged this as a single word request here is a sample sentance:
"The word Twinkle is a ——- because it sounds sparkly and light when spoken which is appropriate to its meaning, but not directly connected"
Thanks in advance for the help, let me know if I can clarify this at all!
Best Answer
I believe you could say that these words are phon(a)esthemic.1 Several2 of the words you are describing feature a phon(a)estheme3 which contributes to your sense that their meaning is somehow reflected in their sound. From Merriam-Webster:
A ThoughtCo article by Richard Nordquist offers a more straightforward definition:
So you could say
1 For those who still aren't sure about this phenomenon, Terry Pratchett explains it better than I can (though it seems he wasn't aware of any common word for it):
2 Wikipedia includes sludge in its examples of phonesthemic words (sl- words are one of the classic English phonestheme examples, along with gl-; sl- words are often pejorative and/or slippery, and sludge fits both), and twinkle also appears on some lists (both for the tw- start and -le end). Splash does have onomatopoeic features, but it also appears on lists with other liquidy spl- words like splat and splutter. I'm not sure whether bell contains any phonesthemic features.
3 These sounds are also sometimes called sub-morphemes (because they seem to carry some meaning even though they don't reach the level of a morpheme) or word-affinities. They are related to ideophones and fall under the more general heading of sound symbolism/phon(a)esthesia/phonosemantics, an area of expertise for EL&U's own John Lawler. There seems to be a continuing debate about whether the "meaning" that attaches to the various sounds is always language-specific (some dictionaries specifically define the phenomenon as a result of having a large number of related words in a language that share the sound) or if there is some inherent, universal connection between some of the sounds and human perception of their connotations, but either way I believe this describes the experience described in the question.