Sneeze
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'Tis the season of sneezing, and I'm doing a lot of it these days. At 5 AM this morning, I was awakened by my own sneezing. It was completely unpremeditated and unexpected. The sounds that came out were aaah-HOOOOO!!!!! Low level / high rising.
The conventional representation of this sound in writing is "achoo". Other variations include "kerchoo" and "hachao", etc. In German, I think that the sound of a sneeze is represented as "hatschee" and in Japanese it is "hakushon".
This morning, the sound that I explosively emitted was aaah-HOOOOO!!!!! Twice.
Since I have a large, Alpine schnoz that acts as an echo chamber, causing the sound to reverberate in my nasal passages, it is extremely loud and ends shrilly. It can be heard a block away, or all the way down the turn of the corridor from my office to the departmental office about 40 paces distant.
As the day wore on, the beginning of the second syllable took on more the characteristics of wheezing, and later became a hushing sibilant, then a hissing sibilant. By late afternoon, it was a "ch-" sound (voiceless postalveolar affricate /ʧ/). The incipit of the second syllable was not constant throughout the day, but I have to say I was surprised when I heard my own sneeze in the morning and realized that its second syllable began quite differently from the conventional onomatopoeic representations of the word.
I must add that sometimes the first syllable began with an "h-" and sometimes with a "k[h]-". The second syllable often ended with a melodic flourish, sometimes quite elaborate, like the cadenzas I used to play when I was a serious French hornist. None of this was intentional. These "sneezes and variations" just happened; they took their own course; I did not consciously control them.
"Sneeze" is an intransitive verb meaning "to involuntarily and with great rapidity expel air as a reflex induced by an irritation in the nose" (adapted from Wiktionary); "to make a sudden violent spasmodic audible expiration of breath through the nose and mouth especially as a reflex act" (Merriam-Webster). As a noun, "sneeze" indicates the act of sneezing.
Everyone who is a native / fluent speaker of English knows the meaning of "sneeze", both as a verb and as a noun. "Sneeze" is not a hard word to spell, so virtually anyone who knows this common word for such a natural human reflexive physiological response to an allergenic irritant will be able to record the word in written form, whether the spelling is "correct" or not.
Similarly, everyone who is a native / fluent speaker of Modern Standard Mandarin (MSM) will know the word for "sneeze" and how to pronounce it: pēntì 噴嚏. But there the similarity ends. In all my decades if teaching and interacting with hundreds of native speakers of MSM, I only met two who could write both sinographs for pēntì 噴嚏, and only a handful who could write one of the two sinographs (the first one, of course). All the rest were stumped and had to leave a blank space or resort to pinyin (like this).
Selected readings
- "Sneeze, hiccup, cough" (12/19/14)
- "Spelling bees and character amnesia"
- "Of toads, modernization, and simplified characters"
- "Character amnesia revisited"
- "Character Amnesia"
- "French Horn Church" (9/13/24)
- "Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard", by David Moser, in Pīnyīn.info, from Victor H. Mair, ed., Schriftfestschrift: Essays in Honor of John DeFrancis on His Eightieth Birthday, 27 (August, 1991), ix, 245 pp.
AntC said,
September 1, 2025 @ 12:11 am
Bless you! [**]
pēntì doesn't sound very onomatopoeic. Can the MSM pronunciation be traced back through sound changes to something more like /əˈt͡ʃuː/, /ɑːˈt͡ʃuː/ or /snɔɹt/ ? (Although compare wikti on 'sneeze': from Proto-West Germanic *fneusan, from Proto-Germanic *fneusaną, from Proto-Indo-European *pnew- (“to breathe, pant, snort, sneeze”). Both MSM and PIE start with a plosive-nasal, also English /pænt/.)
Or is there an alternative word (perhaps baby-talk) something like 'achoo'?
[**] Early Spring in New Zealand. The pine forests in the mountains are releasing their pollen. With the typical Westerly winds in this season, that gets blown all the way to the cities on the Eastern seaboard. A pale yellow dust settles on gardens, cars, and washing. Asthmatics stay indoors! The pollen is caustic when inhaled.
Bob Ladd said,
September 1, 2025 @ 12:59 am
@AntC: Thanks for the etymological stuff and the link between the original form (with fn-) and the PIE root pnew-. I had always assumed that sneeze was simply part of the sound-symbolic set snort, sniff, snore, snot, etc., all with connections to the nose. But it seems that both those things are true: the OED's etymology suggests that the original form with fn- was replaced in Middle English with just n- (as in modern German niesen) and then sn-, "which was probably substituted as more expressive".
Philip Taylor said,
September 1, 2025 @ 3:33 am
Post cardiac surgery I have to clutch the right-hand side of my chest and pull it to the left when I feel a sneeze coming, otherwise something on the right-hand side tears and remains painful for several days. That said, the sound that I make is far closer to "pshhhhh" than "a-choo" or any of the variants listed above. I now wonder whether I made an "a-choo" sound prior to cardiac surgery …
Francois Lang said,
September 1, 2025 @ 9:15 am
Just a marginally relevant factoid:
The Lithuanian for "thank you" is "Ačiū", which a former Lithuanian acquaintance pronounced just like our Language Log word of the moment, i.e., Ah-CHOO!
Victor Mair said,
September 1, 2025 @ 11:46 am
From Alice Mendelsohn:
=====
This is definitely not an overview to be sneezed at…
And speaking of sneezes, I have been thinking about sneezes lately, given the seasonal impetus, and I got a distant memory flash of a lovely sneeze poem. Author unknown by me.
Happy sneezing,
=====
VHM:
Alice's father, Donald M. Kennedy, our high school band director, taught students to play musical instruments in their home. He was extremely allergic to so many things (probably even more than me), so the girls who played flutes and clarinets (sitting in front of the band) couldn't put on perfume or other cosmetics, and his wife Gertrude had to bake everything from potato and other types of flour.
DMK put this sign outside his teaching studio for the parents who would wait there for their children to finish their lessons:
Viseguy said,
September 1, 2025 @ 1:35 pm
Google says that the medical term is sternutation. OED: [ad. L. sternūtātiōnem, n. of action f. sternūtāre, frequentative f. sternuĕre to sneeze, cogn. w. Gr. πτάρνυσθαι (:—*pstrnu-) of the same meaning.]
Then there's this — which I somehow never learned in my four years of Russian in college:
https://www.tiktok.com/@helpmyrussian/video/7127340835720482090
Barbara Phillips Long said,
September 1, 2025 @ 2:00 pm
Related to the confusion over how to depict the sound of a sneeze, the sounds of cheering seems also to vary. In my early reading, I saw it mostly represented by “hurrah” or “hurray.” Sometime later — around the U.S. bicentennial, I think — it often became “huzzah,” I never did figure out why it changed.
– – – – –
Credit Ogden Nash with “I sneezed a sneeze into the air.” Others have noted its similarity to the opening of “The Arrow and the Song,” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow:
“I shot an arrow into the air,
It fell to earth, I knew not where;
For, so swiftly it flew, the sight
Could not follow it in its flight.”
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44624/the-arrow-and-the-song
JMGN said,
September 1, 2025 @ 2:16 pm
What does the inital aitches actually represent in interjections? I've never heard one…
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/hachoo#English
John S. Rohsenow said,
September 1, 2025 @ 2:21 pm
"Who you sneezin' at?"
"At(ch) YOU!"
CuConnacht said,
September 1, 2025 @ 2:31 pm
Barbara Philips Long, huzzah (first recorded c 1570) predates hurrah by about a century. I have only heard it used jocularly, as a deliberate archaism.
Steve Morrison said,
September 1, 2025 @ 8:02 pm
@Barbara Phillips Long:
Then there’s a version I saw in one of Robert A. Heinlein’s books:
HS said,
September 1, 2025 @ 8:08 pm
@Barbara Phillips Long
> Credit Ogden Nash with “I sneezed a sneeze into the air.”
Or perhaps credit Merwyn Bogue, AKA Ish Kabibble. See this blog and the comments at the bottom.
AntC said,
September 2, 2025 @ 12:32 am
“The Arrow and the Song,” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow:
As quoted in the Ealing Comedy 'Kind Hearts and Coronets'
Chas Belov said,
September 2, 2025 @ 12:38 am
I'm pretty sure that when I sneeze it comes out a-choo. Not sure of the exact first vowel, but definitely sure about the "choo" part.
Barbara Phillips Long said,
September 2, 2025 @ 10:12 am
@HS —
The source you cite does seem to present a better claim than Ogden Nash. So, the author is unlikely to be Nash. It’s too bad there isn’t clearer, more definitive evidence for Bogue, though.
HS said,
September 2, 2025 @ 9:39 pm
@Barbara Phillips Long
Although it's not an original source, the L.A. Times obituary for Bogue explicitly quotes that poem. But it is of course very much in Ogden Nash's style and it seems virtually everybody misattributes it to him. (I'd never heard of Bogue and would have unhesitatingly guessed it was by Nash if I hadn't stumbled on that blogpost I linked to.)
Tom Dawkes said,
September 3, 2025 @ 2:40 am
@ JMGN
I think the 'h-' may express the intake of breath I and other people make when we fell a sneeze coming and try to avert it.
JMGN said,
September 3, 2025 @ 3:31 am
I must be allergic to failure,
'cause everytime I come close to it I just sneeze,
but I just go achoo then a-chieve
Survival by Eminem
https://genius.com/2101497
David Marjanović said,
September 6, 2025 @ 12:05 pm
I've often heard things like [hə̰̃ˈʔ(ː)ŋ] followed by a narial fricative, including from myself sometimes. But also quite different things.
The usual German representation is hatschi [haˈt͡ʃiː], rarely haptschi.