in grammar and rhetoric, a figure where words are formed to resemble the sound emitted by the things signified; as the buzz of bees, the cackling of hens, or the note of the cuckoo. Resemblances of this kind are often fancied when they are not real; though, no doubt, there are in every language some words of which the sound is very like to that which those words are employed to express. Yet, to the mortification of grammarians and rhetoricians, conjunctions, which have been pronounced to be no parts of speech at all, are the only sounds uttered by men which are wholly natural, and these are fewer than is commonly supposed.