Question from English4.today member Enrique in Spain: What does the word ‘onomatopoeia’ mean… I’ve seen it and it is one of those weird english words that I find hard to understand”. Here is the answer, Enrique! Boom! Yes, that was an onomatopoeia. Not the sound itself but the word I used to describe it. Onomatopoeia are words that imitate the sound of the object or actions they are describing. Thus from this: [sound] we get ‘woof woof’. And from this [sound] we get ‘meow meow’. And from this [sound] we get the rather approximate ‘cock-a-doodle-do’. And from explosions, electrical sounds, fights, slamming doors, etcetera, we get a whole range of comic book filler vocabulary such as ‘bang!’, ‘pow!’, ‘slap!’,’zip!’, ‘boom!’ and ‘crash!’. You can see that some of these words like ‘boom’, a stock market boom, for example, or zip and crash have actually taken on a life of their own and refer not just to the originating sound but to a rapidly developing market, a ...