> people want to guess words they use or have heard of, not "aahed"

That isn't a correct diagnosis; people have heard of aahed. You'll find it naturally in the expression "[someone] oohed and aahed".

People don't want aahed, and their instinct that it shouldn't count is reasonable, but unfamiliarity isn't the problem with it.

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zarzavat 8 hours ago | parent [-]

Ooh and aah aren't words, they're sounds (onomatopoeia). A sound is just a sequence of letters used for their phonological values.

You can spell the sound "ah" however you like: ah, ahh, aah, aahh, there's no wrong way to spell it.

If you write "the washing machine tringged when it finished", 'tring' is not a word, even though it's following the rules of English morphology, you could have written any sequence of letters that most faithfully reproduces the sound of the washing machine. You could have written katrigged or puh-tringged.

	▲	paulcole 5 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Ooh and aah most certainly are words. Is meow not a word? Can I spell it miough and sit smugly correct?
	▲	thaumasiotes 8 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		That is false; the fact that you can conjugate aah (or tring) into the past tense is sufficient to prove it's a word.