Now, jump ahead thousands of years to Homer’s Iliad—traditionally dated to the eighth century BCE—where the priest Chryses, harshly dismissed by Agamemnon, goes “in silence along the shore of the loud-roaring ( polufloisboio) sea.” Polu- is a common Greek and English prefix (as in polyglot). But -floisboio is not so common, and much more remarkable: It strikes the ear like, well, a crashing wave—or a lackluster imitation of one. This noun from ancient Greek, polufloisbos (here, in the nominative case), is onomatopoeic: a word that somehow imitates or suggests the sound it references. We tend to like such words. Think of