Which songs use onomatopoeia?

Charli XCX's "Boom Clap" (2014), the Black Eyed Peas' "Boom Boom Pow" (2009), Kesha's "Tik Tok" (2009), Tag Team's "Whoomp! (There It Is)" (1993), and ABBA's "Ring Ring" (1973) all build their hooks from onomatopoeia (a word that imitates the sound it names): a bass hit, a clock, an impact, a telephone. Frank Sinatra's famous scat run at the end of "Strangers in the Night" (1966) does not qualify, even though it gets cited as onomatopoeia all the time. One test separates the two, and it decides every entry on this list.

"Boom Clap" vs. "Boom Boom Pow": the clearest modern pair

Both songs are named for the same root sound-word, and both put it at the center of the hook, but they use it to different structural ends.

In "Boom Clap" (Charli XCX, 2014), the title pair is the chorus hook: a two-beat figure where the first word imitates a bass or kick-drum hit and the second imitates a hand clap or snare. The lyric ties that two-beat pattern to a heartbeat, so the sound-words are doing double duty. They mimic the drum pattern under them and they name what the song says a heart in love sounds like.

In "Boom Boom Pow" (Black Eyed Peas, 2009), the same root word gets stacked instead of paired. Three onomatopoeic syllables in a row form a rhythmic chant, repeated as the song's title and refrain. There is no heartbeat metaphor here; the words imitate the track's own drum hits and function as pure percussion you can sing.

Both hooks pass the basic test for a word that imitates the sound it names: say the word aloud and you are producing a rough copy of a real acoustic event, a low impact for the first word, a sharp one for the others.

Kesha's "Tik Tok" (2009)

The title is the onomatopoeia. The paired words imitate the tick of a clock, respelled for the song (and predating the app of the same name by several years). Kesha uses the clock sound in the chorus as a countdown: the party runs on a timer, and the ticking is the sound of that timer running.

The word also does structural work. The clock sound opens the hook, and everything after it argues against the clock, insisting the night will not stop. The onomatopoeia names the exact pressure the song is written against.

Tag Team's "Whoomp! (There It Is)" (1993)

"Whoomp" is not a dictionary word. Tag Team coined it, and it still counts as onomatopoeia, because the coinage imitates a sound rather than describing one. Say it and you get a passable vocal imitation of a heavy impact, somewhere between a bass drop and a body slam, which is exactly what the word marks in the song: the moment the beat lands.

The exclamation point in the title matters too. It signals that the word is an eruption, a sound event, not a statement. Invented sound-words like this are common in music for the same reason they are common in comics: when no existing word imitates the sound you want, you build one.

ABBA's "Ring Ring" (1973)

Here the title and hook imitate a ringing telephone, doubled the way a phone actually rings. The song is about a narrator waiting for a call that never comes, and the chorus opens with the ring itself, the literal event the whole lyric is waiting for.

That placement is what makes the example clean. The onomatopoeia is not decoration on top of the song's subject; it is the song's subject, rendered as sound. Every time the chorus comes around, the listener hears the phone the narrator is staring at.

Rimsky-Korsakov's "Flight of the Bumblebee" (1900)

One example with no lyrics at all. In "Flight of the Bumblebee," the rapid chromatic line, whether played on strings, flute, or anything fast enough, is a direct sonic imitation of a bee in flight. No word is involved, but the imitative principle is identical: the music copies a specific real-world sound the way "boom" copies a bass hit.

This widens what "a song uses onomatopoeia" can mean. Lyrical onomatopoeia imitates a sound with a word; instrumental writing like this imitates it with melody and rhythm. Comics do a third version of the same move, rendering sound effects as printed words on the page rather than as heard sound.

Did you know? Rimsky-Korsakov wrote "Flight of the Bumblebee" as an orchestral interlude for his 1900 opera The Tale of Tsar Saltan. In the scene, a prince is transformed into a bee, and the buzzing figure is scene-painting for his flight, imitation with no sung word anywhere in it.

What people mistake for onomatopoeia in songs

Scat singing and vocalese are the most common false positives, and they show up on nearly every list of songs like this one.

Frank Sinatra's scat run at the end of "Strangers in the Night" (1966) is the textbook case: a string of doo-syllables improvised over the fade-out. The syllables sound word-like, but they imitate nothing in the world. They are nonsense filler standing in for melody, chosen because they are easy to sing, not because a "doo" exists anywhere outside the song.

Simon & Garfunkel's "The Boxer" (1969) fails the same way. The wordless refrain of the chorus, a repeated la-syllable pattern, carries the tune where a lyric might have gone. Paul Simon has said the refrain was a placeholder that stuck. It is memorable, but it imitates no sound.

The test: does the syllable name an actual sound in the world? "Ring" does; a telephone really makes that sound. A scat syllable does not; it is filler for a tune. If the syllable exists only to carry melody, it is scat or vocalese, not onomatopoeia.

How to tell if a lyric is really onomatopoeia

Pull the word out of the song and ask what it imitates. "Tick tock" imitates a clock. "Boom" imitates an impact. "Ring ring" imitates a phone. Each names a specific, real acoustic event, and saying the word out loud gets you close to the event itself. A catchy or rhythmic syllable that imitates nothing fails the test, no matter how percussive it feels to sing.

The songs that hold up under that test are the ones where the sound-word is load-bearing. It sets the hook, or it mimics the song's own subject: the clock the party is racing, the phone that will not ring, the beat dropping. Most lyrical examples draw on the same stock of common onomatopoeia words that prose does: clocks, impacts, rings, buzzes. A word from that stock earns its place in a song the same way it earns a place in a sentence: by doing the work of the sound itself, not by being noise for noise's sake.