When I use a word . . . The most beautiful medical words

The most beautiful English words

In a 1955 lecture titled English and Welsh, inaugurating the O’Donnell Lectures, J R R Tolkien asserted that “most English-speaking people … will admit that cellar door is ‘beautiful’, especially if dissociated from its sense (and from its spelling). More beautiful than, say, sky, and far more beautiful than beautiful.” The O’Donnell Lectures were established to promote interest in how the English language had been influenced by Celtic languages, and the phrase “cellar door” contains elements that are common in Welsh phonology.1

This observation, however, was not novel to Tolkien. It had been expounded in the 1903 novel Gee Boy by Cyrus Hooper, where it was attributed to an earlier, albeit unidentified, author: “He even grew to like sounds unassociated with the meaning, and once made a list of the words he loved most, as doubloon, squadron, thatch, fanfare (he never did know the meaning of this one), Sphinx, pimpernel, Caliban, Setebos, Carib, susurro, torquet, Jung frau. He was laughed at by a friend, but logic was his as well as sentiment; an Italian savant maintained that the most beautiful combination of English sounds was cellar-door; no association of ideas here to help out! sensuous impression merely! the cellar-door is purely American.” 2

So it seems that “cellar door” may be sonorous to both Welsh and English speakers. It certainly contains phonologically attractive elements—the sibilance of the initial /c/ and the liquidity of the /l/ and /r/. And in both Hooper’s and Tolkien’s descriptions the need for beautiful meaning is denied.

Another list of beautiful words was created in 1932 by the lexicographer Wilfred J Funk (1883–1965); his “ten most beautiful words in the English language” were chimes, dawn, golden, hush, lullaby, luminous, melody, mist, murmuring, and tranquil. He later extended his list to 31 items.3

Many other English words have been suggested to be among the most beautiful in the language, including loanwords that, imported from other languages, have taken their places in English.

Lists of such supposedly “most beautiful” words have been published in many websites4567891011 and a book.12 I have combined Funk’s list with all of these and have analysed them.

These lists contain, in sum, 612 items, of which several are included in more than one list, leaving 372 unique items. Few of those that are duplicated appear in more than two, three, or four lists, suggesting that there has been little if any copying across the lists. For example, only four of Funk’s 31 appear in other lists.

The most frequently listed item, occurring in eight different lists, is “ethereal.” After that come “elixir,” “halcyon,” and “mellifluous” (six times each), and then “aurora,” “effervescent,” “eloquence,” “ephemeral,” “epiphany,” “gossamer,” “onomatopoeia,” “quintessential,” “serendipity,” “sonorous,” and “surreptitious” (five times each).

Perhaps these 15 words could therefore be considered the most beautiful, par excellence. After all, what word is more mellifluous than “mellifluous” or more sonorous than “sonorous”?

What makes a word beautiful?

The main feature of all the words on the lists I have analysed is phonological attractiveness. And in most cases the words on the lists also often have meanings that most would find attractive, as the above examples illustrate.

However, that is not always the case. “Bungalow,” for example, a loanword from Hindi, features in four lists. However, the meaning of the word, any single-storied house, is neither particularly attractive or unattractive. Other relatively neutral examples include “dénouement,” “etymology,” “erstwhile,” and “insouciance.”

The beauty of a word may be enhanced if it evokes pleasant visual, tactile, or gustatory imagery. That might in part explain the inclusion of “bungalow” on the list, since whoever thought it beautiful enough to include may have had a particular bungalow in mind. The euphony of “champagne” and “ratatouille” might be enhanced by an expectation of gourmet pleasure. Those for whom “crimson” is an especially attractive colour might find the word, otherwise not specially euphonious, attractive. In other cases there may be a personal association that adds beauty to what might otherwise be an uninteresting word. That might explain the presence in the lists of “felicity,” also a girl’s name.

Words that are euphonious, but certainly don’t conjure up pleasant thoughts include “dastardly,” “dissemble,” “dystopia,” “furtive,” “gaunt,” “horripilation,” “lugubrious,” “maelstrom,” “melancholy,” “monotony,” “nefarious,” “racketeer,” and “woebegone.”

In most cases one can see what it is about these words that makes them phonologically attractive.

● most are polysyllabic—nearly 90% have two, three, or four syllables and only 24 are monosyllabic;

● there is no clear pattern to the main stressed syllable—48% have their main stress on the first syllable, including the monosyllabic words; of the rest, 40% have their main stress on the penultimate syllable and 47% on the antepenultimate syllable;

● typically the vowel pattern involves different vowels from syllable to syllable (e.g. “amethyst,” “cynosure,” “imperative,” “velocity”);

● typically the consonant pattern involves different consonants from syllable to syllable (e.g. “centesimal,” “eavesdrop,” “hallucinate,” “kaleidoscope”);

● certain letters occur more commonly than others; the letter /e/ is more frequent than all other letters, but that is a normal feature of the language; however, it is the initial letter in 12% of cases, which is unusual; the sibilant sound of the letter /s/ and soft /c/ is common (about 8% of the total); the liquid letters /l/ and /r/ are together common (about 16% of the total and 12% of initial letters); incidentally, the term “liquid,” applied to these letters, mimics the ancient Greek term, ὑγρός, meaning moist, which the Greek grammarian Dionysius Thrax (170–90 BCE) used to describe the character of the letters lambda and rho, corresponding to our /l/ and /r/; and “moist” is one of the words on my list.

● in a few cases rarity or exoticism may have played a part in the inclusion of a word, for example “lagniappe,” “limerence,” “mondegreen,” “petrichor,” “potamophilous,” “rodomont,” “wafture,” and “xylotomy.” The last of these, which means preparation of sections of wood for microscopy, despite being over 100 years old,13 has not yet made it into the Oxford English Dictionary (OED).

Beautiful medical words

My list includes 18 words that have medical relevance. Here they are, with definitions from the OED:

● bibliotherapy: the use of books for therapeutic purposes, esp. in the treatment of mental health conditions;

● depigmentation: the condition of being deficient or wanting in pigment (in the tissues);

● effervescent: that has the property of rising in bubbles [e.g. in pharmaceutical formulations];

● eidetic: Psychology—applied to an image that revives an optical impression with hallucinatory clearness, or to the faculty of seeing such images, or to a person having this faculty;

● elixir: a supposed drug or essence with the property of indefinitely prolonging life [obsolete]; Pharmacology—a compound magistery, i.e. a composition of various bodies chang’d after the same manner as a single body [from Nathan Bailey’s Dictionarium Britannicum];

● embrocation: a liquid used for bathing or moistening any diseased part; now usually restricted to those applied by rubbing; a liniment;

● emollient: a softening application;

● euphoria: Pathology—”a word used to express well being, or the perfect ease and comfort of healthy persons, especially when the sensation occurs in a sick person” (New Sydenham Soc. Lexicon);

● hallucinate: to have a hallucination or hallucinations;

● histamine: a biologically active amine present in animal and plant tissues and stored in the granules of mast cells and basophils;

● kakorrhaphiophobia: a morbid fear of failure [not in OED];

● lassitude: the condition of being weary whether in body or mind;

● melancholy: Medicine—originally: a pathological condition thought to result from an excess of black bile in the body, characterised in early references by sullenness, ill temper, brooding, causeless anger, and unsociability, and later by despondency and sadness. Later: severe depression, melancholia;

● narcissist: a person characterised by narcissism; an excessively self-admiring person;

● nexus: Cell Biology—an area of fusion or close contact between two adjacent cell membranes, which is characterised by low electrochemical resistance;

● oleander: a poisonous evergreen shrub with leathery lanceolate leaves and fragrant pink or white flowers, Nerium oleander (family Apocynaceae), native from the Mediterranean region eastwards to China and often grown for ornament [often the subject of overdosage with the cardiac glycosides that it contains];

● olfactory: of or relating to the sense of smell or the action of smelling;

● panacea: a remedy, cure, or medicine reputed to cure all diseases.

Observing the principles that mark many beautiful words, it should be possible to identify more beautiful medical words.

A final thought

In his lecture Tolkien asserted that “[linguistic] tastes and predilections which are revealed to us in contact with languages not learned in infancy—O felix peccatum Babel!—are certainly significant: an aspect in linguistic terms of our individual natures. And since these are largely historical products, the predilections must be so too.”14 In other words, our linguistic tastes are shaped by our ancestry. If that is true, since English-speaking peoples come from numerous diverse ancestries, what seems beautiful to one may be radically different from what seems beautiful to others. And other factors may determine predilections. What medical words seem most beautiful to you?