"Onamatterpoetic" (468.10), a word in James Joyce's "Finnegans Wake" (1939), echoes "onomatopoetic", the adjective form of "onomatopoeia", which means that a word means what it sounds like, such as the palindrome "tattarrattat" Joyce coined in "Ulysses" (1922): "I knew his tattarrattat at the door." "Onomatopoeia" is a direct borrowing of a Greek word meaning "the making of words"; its earliest citation in the Oxford English Dictionary is from 1553. But "onamatterpoetic" is also "on a poetic matter", so, just like so many other moments in Joyce's novel, it could be the title of an essay on "Finnegans Wake" itself, and particularly on how he fills it with the "making of words". (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 14 September 2025)