A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1367 entries
susurrus
Susurrus is a soft whispering, murmuring, or rustling sound, and it is used most often of wind in leaves, of running water, and of a crowd talking quietly. It is a literary word rather than a working one and it is valued mainly for the way it sounds: the word itself hisses, which is the point of it.
Etymology
The word is Latin for a whisper or a hum, and it is imitative, built to sound like what it describes. The same root gives the verb susurrate and the adjective susurrant. Its Greek counterpart is psithurism, which names specifically the sound of wind in trees and is imitative in exactly the same way.
Notes
Words built to imitate a soft sibilant sound cluster in every language, and English has an unusual number of them: whisper, rustle, hush, hiss, sough, swish, and sigh are all doing the same work with the same consonants. Geophony covers the wider category of the non-living sound of a place.