I saw a list of the 100 most beautiful words in the English language somewhere recently. Some were nice, some seemed like subjective choices that I would not agree with. Based either on sound, meaning or both, or something else, here are a few of mine, off the top of my head. I reserve the right to add more.
- grunion
- payday
- vacation
- hammock
- humus
- mucus
- abide
- tortoise
- apocaplectic
- handcuff
What are yours? (Include English translation if in another language, please).
Here are a few more: pathology, phlebotomist, rhinocerous, shillelagh, obsession, assistant.
apocaplectic is a word?
some of my favorite words:
grimoire
inamorata
bellwether
merrow
spinnaker
anhedonia
argent
heathen
making favorite word lists used to keep me well occupied: http://wordie.org/people/profile/brandelion words can be such beautiful things.
onomatopoetic
nifty
mellow
prodigy
My favorite words:
~obscure
~congruent
~Thursday; I was married on Thursday and both my daughters were born on Thursday
~variable; used as a noun, as in
Oh, and Mig, it occcurred to me that one could attempt to analyze our personalities based on these lists, or, on a more practical level, attempt to figure out some of our passwords,and maybe succeed, which is why I left two words off the list ;-)
peace
love
family
tintinabulation
harpsichord
serenity
kd: more on apocaplectic here: http://metamorphosism.com/archives/000030.html
jann: favorite words doubtless say more about ones psychology than lots of tests.
in german, i am partial to lots of austrian dialect expressions. schaasaugat (sp) for example (meaning “having poor eyesight”) or “Zniachtl”.
woodpile, nightmare, spider.
breakfast, backrub, loon.
Somehow I’m not surprised by the high number of words based on Latin roots that pop up in those lists. I’ve always found that Latin sound wonderfully strange. Here just those that I’m sure of:
vacation
humus
mucus
anhedonia
obscure
congruent
variable
consumption
contingent
appropriate
extrapolate
tintinabulation
serenity
family
peace
inamorata
But I like classical Greek, too, even if there are only a few instances of it to be found here:
apocaplectic
onomatopoetic
anhedonia
(Of course its sometimes hard to say if something is derived from the Greek or the Latin version of a word, and I’m neither a classicist nor an etymologist)
I’ve got three languages to draw from (and a few pieces of some others) so I thought I’d limit myself to one word from each language in the instance of saving time.
English: harbinger
Spanish: correcaminos (roadrunner… like the little bird that’s always getting chased by the coyote. That was one of the first Spanish words I learned when I was about eight.)
Italian: controspionaggio (counter-espionage… “espionage” is a good one in English too. So is “sabotage”.)
Three more; all starting with d:
~daresay (my grandmother used to say this)
~distrait
~disdain
“guava” has to be one of the best words around.
one of my favourite obscure words, for both sound and actual meaning is callipygous.
A couple more words that came up over the course of the day…
ambiguous
disambiguation (all over Wikipedia!)
tsunami
Hedonist
Pedagogue
Sensual
Urethra
Uninimous
Bonus: Ilham – It means inspiration in Malay and Arabic
I love reading your work.
Shekha
I know I won’t remember the best ones until spammers have locked down this thread but the ones I can think of immediately would be;
osmosis
fulcrum
machiavellian
linguistics
My fav. portuguese word:
“Cogumelos”
Means mushrooms, but it’s such a nice word…
I learned a new one! I’m studying Italian so I’m finding new ones all the time…. Today’s word, “macellaio”, which means “butcher” (like the guy who sells you your steak, not the verb).
I’m digging these triple-vowel things we get in Italian. I can’t think of an instance where we have them in Spanish. It sounds cool. :)
epiphany -all time favorite word
lascivious
smarmy
dust bunny :-)
i like the german word as well: lurch!
#1 word of all words: SPONGE: just feels so good to say!
chiaroscuro
Schadenfreude
benediction