The 100 Most Beautiful Words in the English Language

Looks like supercilious got a taste of its own medicine!

That S is totally upside-down. And, let’s get a list going for Spanish! I vote “cacahuates!”

if this is an 08-09 list i would have “spange: to spare some change” on it

To some up my family…….loquacious

the classic “cellar door”…

oh c’moooon!! this is at the very least arbitrary, at a glance I’d say some 85%+ of the listed words come from Latin or post-Latin languages – to an Italian such as myself not only is it hard to imagine an American saying ‘chiaroscuro’ or ‘imbroglio’ but our teachers here encourage us to use typically anglo-saxon words instead of latin ones that would be more spontaneous to us, as this will make us sound more natural..how could I tell her that most of the ‘ 100 most beautiful English words ‘ are latinate? or is being beautiful based on how limited the use of a word is – I, for one, wouldn’t use most of them in everyday life – or how little known it is to the average speaker

i’m REALLY upset that the artist that came up with the alphabet at the top decided to exclude the letter X…And i like Malaria too…the word!

lots are missing for me… luscious, aureole, langorous, dusk, murmur, damozel, dim, damask, candescent, lullaby, aubade, lucent, pluck, delicious, arabesque, ethereal, august, adazzle, dapple, disheveled, acquiesce, lambent, bumblebee…

puddle isn’t on this list.i don’t like this list, it kinda sucks

all or most of these words are latin-based. what about the brute strength and power of all of our germanic-based vocabulary? is that a form of beauty as well?

ah, someone said the word “pluck” – that has germanic roots. good word. straight-forward.

Is there a list of the 100 ugliest words in the English language?  I think most of my friends would vote for “moist” to be on that list.

champagne is a french word for a specific sparkling wine…has nothing to do with english lol

My favorite word is “callipygian”! Look it up… it means, “having beautiful or perfectly proportioned buttocks.”

Beautiful assumes you’re pronouncing the words correctly.

someone spent all that time making that alphabet picture, and they left out the x. 

aubade – sunrise music/ celadon – a shade of light green/ coquelot – poppy-coloured/ caliginous – dark… to name a few…
btw, english has the glorious distinction of having all the semantics and nuances of anyone who decided to conquer the british (or whomever the british admired enough to emulate)… and, in typical style, said people have made the best of it by claiming snippets of other people’s language as their own. Most languages are mongrel, to be fair… all it signifies is that people from different cultures like to speak to each other and be understood.

And anonymous? True enough, but i think they were keeping the ‘X’ out for their own personal treasure map!

after reading the article on peoples’ aversion to the word “moist”, i was surprised to see the word “moiety” included in this list.so, is the word “moist” one of those ugly, beautiful things?

I’ve always enjoyed
“buffoon”.  Or “effluvium” (thank you Fred Exley for
turning me on to that one 25 years ago).

This list is terrible.  I have to disagree with lilt, lagoon, ripple, umbrella, woebegone, and especially Susquehanna.  No offense to those in Pennsylvania, but it seems kind of random to put that on the list.   

I nominate versimilitude and calumny.

Dr. Goodword has a bias against actual English. I’d like to see some of the truly germanic words on this list, but he doesn’t seem to appreciate them as much as he likes Latin, French, and Greek. What about words like “home”, “happy”, “twilight”, “eleven”, etc? Of course, I’m a little obsessed with the older forms of germanic, so my bias is against Latin, French, and Greek interlopers.

Let’s face it, kids, Germanic words just aren’t that pretty. If they were, then they wouldn’t have been displaced by the Latinate words in a post-William the Conqueror world. And in my opinion, any word that survived Middle and Early Modern English, regardless of where it came from, is English.The staccato German tongue isn’t mellifluous. Especially after a couple of biers.

I agree with (one of the) Anonymous: about half the words have roots in Latin or Greek, so they don’t count. A lost opportunity to mention Gaelic and Germanic based words which are beautiful (Gaelic in particular).
 
BTW, I usually speak a Latin based language on a daily basis, not English.
And I don’t think ‘moist’ is such a bad word.
It’s still better than listening to people say names of some cities that were originally in Spanish (i.e. Castelian) or French and have now turned into torture devices of sound because of the pronunciation. Case in point – ‘Des Moines’  
 
And Champagne is a place in France - it’s like saying ‘Bavaria’ or ‘Transylvania’ is one of the most beautiful words in the English language, come on…