they are essentially just a consensus agreed upon by the speakers of a language and have no discernible pattern or relationship to the thing. Second, he says that, because words are arbitrary, they have meaning only in relation to other words. A dog is a dog because it is not a cat or a mouse or a horse, etc. These ideas have permeated the study of words since the 19th century. Types Onomatopoeia Onomatopoeia refers to words that imitate sounds. Some examples in English are bow-wow or meow, each representing the sound of a dog or a cat. Ideophone An ideophone is "a member of an open lexical class of marked words that depict sensory imagery". Unlike onomatopoeia, an ideophone refers to words that depict any sensory domain, such as vision or touch. Examples are Korean mallang-mallang 말랑말랑 'soft' and Japanese kira-kira キラキラ 'shiny'. Ideophones are heavily present in many African and East/Southeast Asian languages, such as Japanese, Thai, and Xhosa. Their form is very often reduplicated, but not necessarily so. Phonaesthemes A phonaestheme is a sub-morphemic sequence of sounds that are associated to a certain range of meanings. A well-known example is English gl-, which is present in many words related to light or vision, such as gleam, glow, or glare. Since it is submorphemic, gl- itself is not a morpheme, and it does not form compounds with other morphemes: -eam, -ow, and -are have no meaning of their own. Phonaesthemes, however, are not necessarily iconic, as they may be language-specific and may not iconically resemble the meaning they are associated to. Sound symbolism in basic vocabulary Blasi et al. (2016), Joo (2020), and Johansson et al. (2020) demonstrated that in the languages around the world, certain concepts in the basic vocabulary (such as the Swadesh List or the Leipzig-Jakarta list) tend to be represented by words containing certain sounds. Below are some of the phonosemantic associations confirmed by the three studies: Magnitude symbolism High front vowels, such as /i/, are known to be perceptually associated to small size, whereas low and/or back vowels, such as /u/ or /a/, are usually associated with big size. This phenomenon is known as magnitude symbolism. Sapir (1929) showed that, when asked which of the two tables, named mil and mal, is bigger than the other, many people choose mal to be bigger than mil. This phenomenon is not only observable in pseudowords,