Over 70 years ago, Roald Dahl proposed that plants could scream in a fictional story called The Sound Machine. He suggested they could shriek — a high-pitched shriek undetectable to the human ear.

The words "tick-tock," "hiss" and "screech" are examples of onomatopoeia because they imitate the sounds they represent: the rhythmic ticking of a clock; an angry cat, or a slowly deflating bike tire; ...