The following article by Chris Tribble discusses the uses of words associated with onomatopoeias in the (Manchester) Guardian Weekly.

Pop go the onomatopoeias

There's been so much gloom and doom of late that I thought it might be fun to look at some lighter-hearted, breakfast cereal kinds of words: onomatopoeias such as snap, crackle and pop.

Onomatopoeia, the phenomenon in which words mimic the sound of the thing they refer to, is a feature of all languages. The sounds we use in our different languages may not all be the same - the English say quack, quack for the sound a duck makes and the French say coin, coin - but its still an onomatopoeia. While the most familiar of these (especially to anyone who has brought up children) are animal noises, there are many words that bring the sounds of the world into our language.

For an animal loving five-year old, however, the Guardian Weekly will disappoint. A search through the archive for quack, woof, meow, baa, moo, twitter and roar is oddly frustrating.

Roar (198), occurs most frequently in the archive but has nothing to do with lions and tigers - crowds, men and aircraft do the roaring.

Baa (96), is an even bigger disappointment because it refers almost entirely to the British Airports Authority, and your five-year olds frustration will continue as we find moo (38) is part of the name of a former South Korean president Roh Moo-hyun, quack (30) refers almost entirely to fraudulent doctors, twitter (18) is what the chattering classes do (as well as some emerging micro-bloggers), woof is a proper name (5), and meow (5) was used to mock some SOuth African rugby players (who weren't tigers).

What of snap, crackle and pop then? Even here the Weekly takes us a long way from the happy noise of breakfast cereal. Snap (264) is found mostly with election, poll, inspections, judgments and decision, while crackle (60) is most frequently connected to the sound of gunfire or short-wave radio.

The big one in this trio is pop; with 1,260 occurrences it is number two in the list of onomatopoeias in the archive - but it's most commonly found with music, stars and culture, not the happy pop of champagne corks.

And if pop is number two, what's the number one? I'm afraid it's crash. Back to gloom and doom ...