Word descriptions for sounds

Via

Audra Wolowiec’s beautiful blog Lineforms.

bang, bark, beep, bellow, blare, blast, bleat, bong, boom, bray, buzz, cackle, cheep, chime, clack, clank, clap, clatter, clink, cluck, clunk, crack, crackle, crash, creak, dingdong, drop, drumming, fizz, glug, gnashing, gobble, grating, growl, grumble, gurgle, hiss, hoot, howl, hum, jingle, jangle, kachink, knock, mew, moan, mod, murmur, neigh, patter, peal, peep, pop, power, pounding, pulsing, purr, put-put, rap, rat-a-tat, rattle, ring, rippling, roar, rumble, rushing, rustle, scream, scrunch, shriek, sizzle, slam, snap, snarl, snort, splash, sputter, squawk, squeal, squish, stamp, swish, swoosh, tap, tattoo, tearing, throb, thud, thump, thunder, tick, tick-tock, tinkle, toot, trill, twang, twitter, wail, wheeze, whine, whir, whisper, yap, yelp, zap

See also: Words Commonly Used to Describe Smells

From the Handbook of Noise Measurement by Arnold P. G. Peterson, General Radio Company 1972:

Tagged: noise, sound, text, word

ringing, cheeping, gasping, smashing, piercing, peeping

whooping, tinkling, raucous, chattering, crooning, bellowing

sobbing, bumping, snarling, growling, pitch, crying

thumping, burping, croaking, clattering, yapping, keening

splashing, yelping, rustling, volume, squeling, howling

barking, sniveling, moaning, pealing, whining, gagging

fizzing, wheezing, honking, hissing, bawling, trumpeting

swishing, sneezing, rumbling, bubbling, ripping, cooing

chirping, shouting, shuffling, tearing, popping, roaring

thunderous, scratching, snorting, crashing, crunching

cackling, tolling, clucking, silent, tapping, soothing, crowing

tranquil, melodious, cacophonous, singing, quiet, tune,

loud, tinkling, noisy, rhythmic, mumbling, twittering, din

beat, blaring, cawing, racket, chattering, murmuring, whistling

clapping, booming, whispering, mewing, snapping, snoring

yelling, mooing, crackling, sighing

The idea for the Describing Words engine came when I was building the engine for Related Words (it’s like a thesaurus, but gives you a much broader set of related words, rather than just synonyms). While playing around with word vectors and the «HasProperty» API of conceptnet, I had a bit of fun trying to get the adjectives which commonly describe a word. Eventually I realised that there’s a much better way of doing this: parse books!

Project Gutenberg was the initial corpus, but the parser got greedier and greedier and I ended up feeding it somewhere around 100 gigabytes of text files — mostly fiction, including many contemporary works. The parser simply looks through each book and pulls out the various descriptions of nouns.

Hopefully it’s more than just a novelty and some people will actually find it useful for their writing and brainstorming, but one neat little thing to try is to compare two nouns which are similar, but different in some significant way — for example, gender is interesting: «woman» versus «man» and «boy» versus «girl». On an inital quick analysis it seems that authors of fiction are at least 4x more likely to describe women (as opposed to men) with beauty-related terms (regarding their weight, features and general attractiveness). In fact, «beautiful» is possibly the most widely used adjective for women in all of the world’s literature, which is quite in line with the general unidimensional representation of women in many other media forms. If anyone wants to do further research into this, let me know and I can give you a lot more data (for example, there are about 25000 different entries for «woman» — too many to show here).

The blueness of the results represents their relative frequency. You can hover over an item for a second and the frequency score should pop up. The «uniqueness» sorting is default, and thanks to my Complicated Algorithm™, it orders them by the adjectives’ uniqueness to that particular noun relative to other nouns (it’s actually pretty simple). As you’d expect, you can click the «Sort By Usage Frequency» button to adjectives by their usage frequency for that noun.

Special thanks to the contributors of the open-source mongodb which was used in this project.

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Adjectives

Sound Adjective for Class 5

Using sound adjectives in English while writing a story or paragraph
is vital as that makes it more interesting and engages the readers. In
this chapter, students will know the words related to sound, usage ,
common mistakes and exceptions that occur while using it.

From this learning concept, students will study:

• Usage of sound adjective words.
• To form a sentence with different sound words and relevant
  examples.
• Some different sound words in English with instances.
• Onomatopoeia words with examples.
• All sound words list with examples which includes loud sounds
  examples, soft sounds examples and animal sounds.

All the learning concepts covered in Class 4 using mind maps,
illustrations, and examples. Students can resolve the two PDF sound
worksheets given at the end of the chapter. The solutions to these
worksheets are also available in PDF format.

Definition:

• Words that describe different types of sound are known as descriptive sounds. There are several words in the
  English Language that help us describe various sounds like soft sounds or loud noises.
• Sound is the sensation that is experienced through hearing. It uses one of the five senses that is our ears
  to transfer the sounds to our brain.

Examples:

1. I could hear the bees buzzing in the garden.



2. This morning I woke up to the sound of the chirping birds.



3. The storm was so severe that I could hear its roaring noise.

How to Form a Sentence with Sound Words?

Let us have a look at how to use sound words and how it can bring about a difference in a sentence.

Adjectives come usually before the noun they describe. For better description , the adjectives and words are
known as adjective phrases.

Common Descriptive Sound Words

Let us have a look at some of the common descriptive sound words used in English.

Words That Show and not Tell

We hear various sounds all the time. But how do we say or pronounce them as words? There are many words that show
and not tell. These words can be categorized as Onomatopoeia. These words phonetically which resembles the sound
it describes. This makes the description more interesting.

Let us have a look at some of the Onomatopoeic words in the table below.

Few More Words to Describe Various Sounds

Here’s a convenient list of descriptive sound words.

1. To show ‘piercing’ or ‘abrupt’ or even ‘loud’ noise have a look at the following words:

Words for Loud or Abrupt Noise
beep	blare	bellow
clack	cackle	clang
clank	croak	clink
ear splitting	fullblast	grating
huff	high frequency	jarring
rumble	rasp	scrunch
shriek	twank	toot
vibrating	wail	zap

2. To indicate gentle sounds use the following words:

Words for Gentle Sounds
breathy	chime
droning	fizz
gurgle	glug
jingle	moan
squish	sizzle
swoosh	swish
trill	tinkle
wheeze	whoosh

3. To indicate animal sounds use the following words:

Words for Animal Sounds
bray	bleat
chirping	cluck
hoot	howl
moo	cock-a-doodle-doo
meow	sizzle
meow	neigh
purr	quack
roar	snort
trumpet	chatter
woof	yelp
rattle	croak
chuckle	wine
squawk	caw

Common Mistakes

1. Use descriptive sounds depending on the purpose. While writing a story or a sentence consider who will read
   it and use descriptive sound accordingly. Knowing the purpose of the passage and its readers will help to
   make the usage of descriptive sounds more effective.
2. Do not forget to use Onomatopoeia. If you want to have sound specific descriptions in your passage or text,
   make use of onomatopoeic words and animal sounds like “bark” or “meow.”
3. There is no doubt in the fact that sometimes less is more. Using too many descriptive sound adjectives can
   confuse the readers.

Exceptions

1. Sometimes some words can be used in general to describe more than one sound source.

Examples:

1. The ‘whispering wind’ narrated a story.

In this expression, the word whispering has been used for wind, though usually it is used for soft human
voice. In fact it can be used for any soft sound.

2. She howled in pain.

Here howled indicates crying loudly in pain.

3. Last night I heard a wolf howling.

The sound of a wolf is known as howling.

2. Sometimes one sound source can have more than one sound.

Examples:

1. The pattering of the rain is audible since morning.
2. The rain kept drumming on the roof the whole day.

Here the sound of the rain can change depending on what surface it falls on.

3. To describe sounds, verbs can also be used for an affective description. For example, saying, “She was loud”
   is precise and descriptive, while “She screamed” suggests a stronger sound sense.

Have a quick look at the mind map below.