Onomatopoeia

Onomatopoeia is the figure in which a word imitates the sound it names — buzz, hiss, clang, splash, murmur — so the word's sound carries part of its meaning. It runs from Homer's roaring sea through Tennyson and Poe to comic-book BAM and POW and the booms and whooshes of ad copy and pop lyrics, and it sits among the figures of sound alongside alliteration and assonance, the two it is most often confused with. Used sparingly it sharpens a line; piled on, it tips into the cartoonish.