Sounds which seem to express a particular quality in whatever words they appear

I noticed that in the English language words ending in "ip" often suggest a brisk, quick movement, as with clip, flip, skip and tip. In other terms, the closing part of these words seems to be suggestive of the meaning itself. Presumably, that circumstance helps advertisers in promoting their products, as, for example, one can see in the picture below.

I'm wondering if there is a name for sounds, like the above mentioned, which seem to express a particular quality whatever words they appear.

Obviously, there are a lot of other cases.

For example, it seems as if "sk" at the start of words such as scoot, skip, scuttle expresses the quick movement implied in all of them, while "sl" suggests either a falling or sliding in movement as in slip, slither, slouch, or something slimy or slushy, as in those words and in sludge, slobber, and slobby.


It sounds like you are noticing something along the lines of the phonosemantics hypothesis, specifically, clustering. From that wikipedia article:

Words that share a sound sometimes have something in common. If we take, for example, words that have no prefix or suffix and group them according to meaning, some of them will fall into a number of categories. So we find that there is a group of words beginning with /b/ that are about barriers, bulges and bursting, and some other group of /b/ words that are about being banged, beaten, battered, bruised, blistered and bashed. This proportion is, according to [Margaret] Magnus, [author of a book on phonosemantics,] above the average for other letters.

Another hypothesis states that if a word begins with a particular phoneme, then there is likely to be a number of other words starting with that phoneme that refer to the same thing. An example given by Magnus is if the basic word for 'house' in a given language starts with a /h/, then by clustering, disproportionately many words containing /h/ can be expected to concern housing: hut, home, hovel, habitat...

Clustering is language dependent, although closely related languages will have similar clustering relationships.


Yes, such sounds are called phonesthemes.

The term phonestheme (or phonaestheme in British English) was coined in 1930 by British linguist J. R. Firth (from the Greek φωνή phone, "sound", and αἴσθημα aisthema, "perception" from αίσθάνομαι aisthanomai, "I perceive") to label the systematic pairing of form and meaning in a language.