This paper introduces the special issue of Linguistic Typology at the Crossroads, entitled “Ideophones: honing in on a descriptive and typological concept”, edited by Aimée Lahaussois, Julie Marsault and Yvonne Treis. The contributions, which are the result of work by a research group on ideophones and interjections, funded by the Labex EFL in Paris, are mainly descriptive papers with a typological perspective, informed by the more than 20 years of ideophone research following the landmark publication edited by Voeltz & Kilian-Hatz in 2001. After introducing the field and briefly presenting each contribution, we discuss issues in ideophone research that the articles gathered here contribute to, namely whether or not ideophones make up a clear-cut word class in different languages, and how different contributors interpret their relationship with onomatopoeia and interjections. We also present an overview of the primary syntactic uses of ideophones in the different languages and highlight the morphological processes attested for ideophonization and deideophonization, which are still under-investigated.