I'm a young Fogarty and you can think of me as your friendly guide to the English language.

We talk about writing, history, rules, and other cool stuff.

Today we're going to talk about why the word tiny actually sounds smaller than the word

huge.

How to properly use the word of, the preposition of, and coca-pelli.

What size to object comes to mind when you hear a made-up word like TD?

Something small or something large?

And does boobah sound round or spiky?

Fascinatingly, research has found that even across languages, people often assign very similar

meanings to certain types of words because of the way they sound.

This idea of words sounding like they're meaning is something most people become acquainted

with early in life when adults ask children what says moo and what says woof.

These words for the noises that animals make are derived from how people perceive the way

the noises sound and then try to copy them in speech.

Of course depending on our language system, we hear these animal noises differently, which

is why dogs might say woof in English, but one-one in Japanese.

Such onomatopoeia or words that mimic something about the things they describe is just the

tip of the iceberg in modern sound symbolism research, a field which studies the non-arbitrary

relationship of sounds to meaning.

Though the idea of words having an inherent sense had been tossed around by philosophers

in antiquity who pondered the nature of meaning, a more scientific look at this topic began

in the early 20th century, focusing specifically on the sounds a word contained rather than

...