The beauty of a word lies both in the meaning and in the sound, the rhythm and the music of the word itself.
Re-blogged from Atkins Bookshelf
The Top Ten Most Beautiful Words in the English Language
The English language is vast, containing more than a million words and growing at a rate of several thousand words each year. However, most English speakers have a vocabulary that is substantially smaller: generally between 20,000 to 35,000. Every once in a while, through reading or conversation, you come across a word that stands out; you think to yourself “that is such a beautiful word.” Many logophiles keep lists of what they consider to be beautiful words. For example, in 1932, to publicize the publication of one of Funk & Wagnalls new dictionaries, founder Wilfred Funk published a list of what he considered, after a “thorough sifting of thousands of words” the ten most beautiful words (in his words, “beautiful in meaning and in the musical arrangement of their letter”) in the English language. (Incidentally, there is a word for that: euphonious — a euphonious word is a beautifully-sounding word; interestingly, euphonious is itself… euphonious.) Here is Funk’s list of the top ten most beautiful words in the English language:
chimes
dawn
golden
hush
lullaby
luminous
melody
mist
murmuring
tranquilMore recently, the editors of BuzzFeed cast their net into the vast ocean of the Twitterverse to find out what people considered the most beautiful words in the English words. They came up with a great list of “32 of the most beautiful words in the English language.” The list should be published with some caveats. One of the words, hiraeth, is actually Welsh. A few are actually neologisms (relatively new words that are in the process of entering common use) and will not be found in traditional dictionaries. Here are the top ten most beautiful English words from that list:
aquiver
mellifluous
ineffable
hiraeth
nefarious
somnambulist
epoch
sonorous
serendipity
limerenceTo celebrate United Nations English Language Day (April 23), the editors of KBLOG, the blog of Kaplan International Languages, published their own list of the top 10 most beautiful English words:
sequoia
euphoria
pluviophile
clinomania
idyllic
aurora
solitude
supine
petrichor
serendipity
Any list would be entirely subjective and arguing against a list makes no sense. All one can do is suggest alternatives. I have chosen a list where I like the word but where the meaning is not necessarily beautiful. They all have at least 3 syllables and I suspect that at least 3 is needed for the word itself to have an inherent rhythm.
surreptitious
sublime
liberation
salamander
mysterious
mellifluous
palpitation
calamitous
infinity, and, of course,
forty-two.
Tags: Words
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