definitions

sound symbolism

noun Linguistics.

a nonarbitrary connection between phonetic features of linguistic items and their meanings, as in the frequent occurrence of close vowels in words denoting smallness, as petite and teeny-weeny.

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Nearby words

sound recordist, sound shift, sound spectrogram, sound spectrograph, sound stage, sound symbolism, sound system, sound truck, sound wave, sound-and-light, sound-and-light show

Origin of sound symbolism

First recorded in 1875–80
Dictionary.com Unabridged Based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2019