Recently, the Poetry Society of America (henceforward PSA – with apologies to all of my male readers who, like me, have a challenging prostate) canvassed more than 1,000 scholars and scribes in an attempt to find “the most beautiful word in the English language”. This being what is charmingly known in Hebrew as ‘the cucumber season’, for which the nearest English equivalent is probably ‘the silly season’, the story of this quest may well have found its way into your newsfeed, as it did into mine. There it caught my eye and triggered my curiosity, so I did some more digging.

My first question was practical: How did PSA actually conduct this search? Did they give the canvassees free range to select any word they wanted? A moment’s consideration was enough to realise that this method would be very unlikely to produce a definitive winner.

In fact, choices had to be made from a list of only 20 candidates, selected in advance by Babbel – a commercial language-learning app – and a team from PSA. The complete shortlist of 20 words presented to the voters was:

1. Aurora – A natural light display in the sky; dawn.
2. Diaphanous – Light, delicate, and translucent.
3. Elysian – Beautiful or creative; divinely inspired; peaceful.
4. Ephemeral – Lasting for a very short time.
5. Ethereal – Extremely delicate and light; heavenly.
6. Halcyon – Idyllically calm, peaceful, and happy.
7. Incandescence – Light emission as a result of being heated; glowing.
8. Luminous – Bright, shining, or shedding light.
9. Mellifluous – Sweet or musical; pleasant to hear.
10. Murmur – A soft, indistinct sound made by a person or group of people.
11. Oblivion – The state of being unaware or forgotten.
12. Penumbra – The partially shaded outer region of a shadow.
13. Petrichor – The pleasant, earthy smell that accompanies the first rain after a dry spell.
14. Sempiternal – Eternal and unchanging; everlasting.
15. Serendipity – The occurrence of finding valuable or agreeable things by chance.
16. Solitude – The state or situation of being alone, often peacefully.
17. Somnambulist – A sleepwalker.
18. Sonorous – Imposingly deep and full (of a voice or sound).
19. Susurrus – Whispering, murmuring, or rustling.
20. Syzygy – The nearly straight-line alignment of three celestial bodies in a gravitational system.

Looking at the list, a couple of features immediately struck me. The first was that the meanings of at least half of the words are associated with pleasant experiences, and none of them, with the possible exception of ‘oblivion’, has unequivocally unpleasant associations. It was no surprise, therefore, to learn that the organisers deliberately selected “phonetically and semantically beautiful words”.

A not-so-brief aside: I felt compelled to add the qualifier ‘possible’ to the penultimate sentence above, because I was suddenly reminded of Tennyson’s ‘The Lotos-Eaters’. ‘

There is sweet music here that softer falls
Than petals from blown roses on the grass,
Or night-dews on still waters between walls
Of shadowy granite, in a gleaming pass;
Music that gentlier on the spirit lies,
Than tir’d eyelids upon tir’d eyes;
Music that brings sweet sleep down from the blissful skies.
Here are cool mosses deep,
And thro’ the moss the ivies creep,
And in the stream the long-leaved flowers weep,
And from the craggy ledge the poppy hangs in sleep.”

[Note also how effortlessly I have worked the newly obligatory reference to The Odyssey into this week’s post.]

This conscious choice of the organisers raises the question: To what extent does our perception of how beautiful a word is depend on the associations of its meaning, rather than its sound? Do you find a word like ‘miasma’ beautiful, even though it means ‘a foul, unhealthy atmosphere’? How about ‘putrescent’? It is interesting that, for me at least, the aesthetics of a word concern its meaning as well as its sound. Curiously, the branch of linguistics and psychology that studies the subjective pleasantness or unpleasantness of a word is known as phonaesthetics, a coining that seems to focus exclusively on the sound of the word, and ignore its connotation.

Incidentally, from the results of the survey, it would seem that most people find a combination of L, M and S sounds particularly beautiful: one might even say, mellifluous.

My second observation is that the list is packed full of words with classical roots. 12 of the 20 words come from Latin, and a further 7 from Greek (some of those via Latin). Only one comes from another language: Persian. You will of course already know from a blog post reference of mine from June 2020 that this particular word is ‘serendipity’.

I must confess to finding something rather elitist and pretentious – or perhaps I should say high-minded – about this propensity or, perhaps, bent – towards classical etymology. What, I find myself protesting, is wrong with words from Anglo-Saxon roots? Are they somehow inherently less beautiful? Or is this, rather, a case of cultural snobbery. Matt Brogan, executive director of the PSA, pointed out that: “One of the paradoxes of language is that it is easier to hear the distinctive music of a language you don’t know than one you do,”, and perhaps the PSA’s bias reflects the fact that, despite almost a millennium of influx of French and Latin vocabulary, native English speakers still feel more at home with Anglo-Saxon roots.

In a bid for the recognition of the beauty of Anglo-Saxon roots, let me offer you ‘gloaming’ (meaning twilight or dusk) and ‘gossamer’ (literally, a fine, filmy substance consisting of cobwebs spun by small spiders); ‘heartfelt’ and ‘wanderlust’.

Two final observations, before we get to the award ceremony.

First, a quarter of the words describe a particular quality of light. The presence of light, in all its multitudes of varieties and shades throughout the day and night, is arguably the greatest single beauty of the natural world, and the list reflects this.

Second, there is, for my money, one glaring odd man out in the official list of 20 words. Lacking a single L, or M, brutally scientific, with a single, repeated, harsh short vowel sound, how ‘syzygy’ made the list is beyond me. It means (as if you needed me to remind you) ‘the nearly straight-line alignment of three celestial bodies in a gravitational system’, which is a concept that almost totally lacks romanticism. You have to love that ‘nearly’: syzygy represents a failure. Neither the connotation nor the sound holds, for me at least, any beauty or music. I suppose, as my title proclaims, that beauty is indeed in the ear of the hearkener.

And now, the envelope, please, and a drum-roll might be in order.

In third place, with 10% of the votes from the over 1,500 poets, writers, and language enthusiasts, was ‘mellifluous’, describing ‘something sweet, smooth or pleasant’ (appropriately enough).

Just ahead, with 12% of the vote, came ‘ethereal’, meaning ‘otherworldly’ (also a beautiful word). I must agree that the softness and length of all three consonantal sounds and the lilting rhythm of the word make it a strong contender.

And the winner, with a whopping 17% of the vote, was ‘diaphanous’, meaning ‘characterized by such fineness of texture as to permit seeing through’. (The word, it has to be said, has more beauty than the clomping definition I offer here. Perhaps it would have been better to define it as ‘translucent’.)

What you do with this information is, as always, entirely up to you. If I have caused you, this week, to linger for a moment and smell the linguistic roses, or even the semantic coffee, then I consider that as mission accomplished. If I have also helped you to forget, for a brief moment, the lamentable state of the world, all the better.

By this time next week, we will have been bonding again, first away and then at home, with the kids and grandkids, and I may well have some tales to share. Until then, stay well, stay sane, and stay cool.