Etymology

ideophone

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Today it means: A word that uses sound symbolism to express aspects of events that can be experienced by the senses, like smell, color, shape, sound, action, or movement. Full definition →

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The story

From ideo- + -phone. James F. Fordyce (The Ideophone as a Phonosemantic Class: The Case of Yoruba, in Current approaches to African linguistics, Ivan R. Dihoff (ed.), page 263) credits C. M. Doke with introducing the term in 1935.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.