rrrrrrrrrrrr.

n.  the creaking of an iron crank, as described in the novel Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban.


n.  the honk of a truck horn, as described in Love All the People: Letters, Lyrics, Routines by Bill Hicks.


n.  the warbling purr of a cat that “sounds like a Scrabble tile [is] stuck in [its] throat” (Lilian Jackson Braun, The Cat Who Lived High).

RRRRRRrrrrrr RRRRRRrrrrrr.

n.  the “painful sounds” of someone grinding his teeth.

<[His teeth grinding] sounded like a poor, helpless animal caught in a trap, struggling to get free, and screaming for help in a deep-seated growl.  It sounded like “RRRRRRrrrrrr, RRRRRRrrrrrr...”  The sounds were wild, sharp, and piercing.  —Grace Cornish, 10 Good Choices That Empower Black Women’s Lives.>

rrrrrrrrrrrrr.

n.  a lion’s roar, as described in Does My Child Have a Speech Problem by Katherine L. Martin.


n.  an expression of anger in the poem “Black Art” by Amiri Baraka, in which the poet “finds that the normal boundaries of poetic language no longer contain the words he needs in order to express his rage” and therefore uses “raw sounds” like rrrrrrrrrrrrr that turn “language into the verbal guns of ‘poems that kill’” (Christopher Beach, The Cambridge Introduction to Twentieth-Century American Poetry).

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