A long time ago a friend opined that the most beautiful word in the English language was syphilis. You could hear in his delivery that he hadn’t thought it up himself. He was an acquaintance really.
Well I recently googled beautiful words — and there was a stack of lists, each 100 Most Beautiful Words in English. A trove. A wealth of words. But ailurophile? It means a cat-lover, which I am, but I’ve never heard it pronounced. Have you? You’ve heard of syphilis.
In four of the five lists I consulted, ailurophile appears. Alarming, yes? In three of them it’s Beautiful Word Number One. Followed by assemblage. And beleaguer. Beleaguer?? A lumpy word, not a bit mellifluous. The –guer is not pronounced a la francais, it’s spoken “-ger” as in grrrrrrrr.
Or if you’re going for beautiful meanings in these lists, you’ll find your beleaguer beleaguered.
The lists have more identical words than they do dissenting ones. We can’t agree on creamy vs chunky and these folks are trolling through Merriam-Webster’s some 165,000 entries and catching mostly the same fish? Credulity strained.
Why list beautiful words if you don’t stop and play with the sound of them — don’t enjoy rolling them around in your mouth, tinkle one against the swoosh of another? Why bother? Post about petunias instead. Cheeseburger relishes.
After a lifetime love affair with the sounds and polished nuances of English, I’ve been goaded to offer you my alternative list. Please feel free to augment, dismember or enshrine it.
Maybe the 100 Most Beautiful Words in the English Language
- amorous
- ashimmer
- ameliorate
- aulophilia (affinity for or aroused by flutes)
- balloon
- buffalo
- cantilever
- centrifugal
- chafing
- chamois
- chronology
- cilia
- cornucopia
- corpuscular
- culmination
- curlicue
- cushion
- Cyrillic
- doofus
- dwindle
- ebullient
- embellish
- empathy
- ensemble
- epiphany
- esophagus
- especially
- estrous
- euonymus
- euthanasia
- facility
- falafel
- fallacious
- fallopian
- flimsy
- fluency
- Halloween
- hallucination
- harmonious
- Hershey
- hilarious
- hollowware
- horripilation
- hula
- humane
- humorous
- inebriate
- lamina
- larboard
- luscious
- luminous
- malleable
- mallow
- mammal
- marine
- melanin
- mellifluous
- melodious
- merciful
- misnomer
- muffle
- muon
- nymphomania
- omphalos
- pacify
- panoply
- parsimonious
- paucity
- pellucid
- pendulum
- penumbra
- Permian
- phosphorus
- piffle
- plangent
- plenary
- pliable
- possum
- pufferbelly
- pulmonary
- Rastafarian
- rhomboid
- riparian
- salacious
- salinity
- senescence
- sensuous
- shallow
- shambles
- sheepish
- shimmy
- simian
- smithereens
- supercilious
- superfluous
- swaddling
- syllabus
- unison
- whither
- yellow
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The 100 Most Beautifuls:
- • 100 Most beautiful words in the English language* | Deshoda
- • alphaDictionary * The 100 Most Beautiful Words in English
- • Ned Hardy » 100 Most Beautiful Words In The English Language
- • The Most Beautiful Words in English | ALTA Language Services
- • UNDER THE ROOT: 100 Most Beautiful Words
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I offer these as a few examples of sites that really do care about words:
- • Wordnik
- • WordNet – About WordNet
- • Oxford Dictionaries Online including the Oxford English Dictionary (OED)
- • Merriam-Webster Online, Dictionary and Thesaurus
- • my own Nota-Webster Dictionary
- • Luciferous Logolepsy
- • World Wide Words: Weird Words Index
- • 9 Foreign Words the English Language Desperately Needs | Cracked.com