Baa Baa Black Sheep: Treatment of Words for Animal Sounds in Two Online English Dictionaries

The paper examines the entries of 36 words for common animal sounds in two online English dictionaries, Cambridge Dictionaries and The Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, to see what information is provided in the entries. Previous work on English dictionaries has focused on meaning explanations of referential, arbitrary words. With the examination of onomatopoeic words for animal sounds, this paper expands the field beyond the study of arbitrary words and into words whose forms contribute to their meaning.

The results show that there are no consistent policies for how words for animal sounds are handled, or how the animal readings are separated from other possible meanings of the words. There is variation in how explicitly the animals are mentioned in the definitions of meaning, and if they are in fact mentioned at all. The entries for the verb and noun uses of the words may not contain the same information. The examples, in cases where the animal readings are exemplified at all, may come in a different entry from where the relevant definition of meaning is provided. One of the dictionaries also relies heavily on definitions where the word’s meaning is explained in terms of itself. The use of synonyms in the meaning explanations of onomatopoeic words is also found to be problematic. As these words do not merely identify a referent, but describe or imitate what the referent sounds like, exchanging one word for another does not carry over the same imagery of sound.