Sound symbolism is not a very satisfactory term but it is a familiar one to cover a phenomenon which has been noted and studied over very many years, the apparent appropriateness of the sound-structures of many individual words for their meanings. A better description for this might be 'natural expressiveness'. More serious than the right name for the phenomenon of 'sound symbolism' is the cast-iron orthodoxy formulated by leading authorities in linguistics that the phenomenon does not exist at all. SAUSSURE (1915) denied onomatopoeia (and all other natural expressiveness of words) other than as marginal, and treated even apparent onomatopoeic words as no more than conventionalised forms. This certainty on the part of Saussure and his followers is all the more surprising and apparently perverse in the face of the exceptionally long history of evidence to the contrary, presented by equally perceptive and equally authoritative writers, and in the face of what has in this century become the large body of scientifically planned experiment establishing the reality of sound symbolism.