There are ten thunderwords in Finnegans Wake, the first nine are 100 letters long, the last 101. While they are aurally constructed to sound like thunder, they are not purely onomatopoetic words: they are assembled out of words or parts of words.

It is thought by many that the thunder is the only aspect of the ‘real’ world of the dreamer of Finnegans Wake to appear in the book: there is a thunderstorm while he is dreaming; when thunder cracks it makes its way into the dream.

 

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