When you take an existing word and you remove a prefix or a suffix and you get a new word.
When a word is coined based on the imitation of a sound that the object it describes or the action it describes makes.
Coming up on Word Matters, a look at two especially interesting ways that words come to be.
I'm Emily Brewster and Word Matters is produced by Merriam-Webster in collaboration with New England Public Media.
On each episode, Merriam-Webster editors Neil Servin, Amon Shea, Peter Sakalowski,
and I explore some aspect of the English language from the dictionary's vantage point.
At Merriam-Webster,
we love to visit the newborn words in the newborn word nursery where we marvel at their tiny fingernails and coo over their creation stories,
especially charming are the creation stories involving Anamana Pia.
That's when a word is formed in imitation of a sound,
think buzz or pop. And like buzz and pop,
these words sometimes embark on careers distinct from their initial imitative roles.
Here's Neal Servin with some words that started as onomatopoeia and went on to live less obvious lives.
We talk about the different ways that words enter the language and I think one of the more fun ways that we learn in school is through what we call onomatopoeia.
And that is when a word is coined based on the imitation of a sound that the object it describes or the action it describes makes.
You think from the old Batman cartoon,
the sound effects that would appear on screen whenever there was a fight scene,
it would be pow and thwack.
Those are sound effects, but obviously words like snap, crackle and pop from Rice Krispies,
the sound of the cereal, but the word snap sounds like a finger snapping.