When I use a word . . . The ugliest medical words

The ugliest English words

In his 1895 novel The Time Machine, H G Wells described a time hundreds of thousands of years hence, when the planet is inhabited by two separate human species, one pleasant and childlike, the other savage and brutal.1 The two species are called the Eloi and the Morlocks. It’s not hard to guess, from their names, which species is which. The euphony of “Eloi” and the harsh sound of “Morlocks” gives the game away, mirroring their characters.

This implies not two but three types of English words: those that are euphonious, pleasant sounding, and therefore in some sense beautiful; those that are cacophonic, ill sounding, and therefore in some sense ugly; and those that are neither. Deciding which is which is not straightforward. Many factors, other than the way they sound, are involved.

I have previously discussed English words that are regarded as beautiful.2 I analysed 372 such words, as listed in various sources, and I concluded that the 15 words that are generally regarded as the most beautiful are aurora, effervescent, elixir, eloquence, ephemeral, epiphany, ethereal, gossamer, halcyon, mellifluous, onomatopoeia, quintessential, serendipity, sonorous, and surreptitious.

Although not all of them are euphonious, or not obviously so, most of the words that are considered the most beautiful are indeed fair sounding; and in many cases, although again not always, they also conjure up pleasant thoughts.

From the same corpus I sorted out 18 medical words that appeared most often in the published lists: bibliotherapy, depigmentation, effervescent, eidetic, elixir, embrocation, emollient, euphoria, hallucinate, histamine, kakorrhaphiophobia, lassitude, melancholy, narcissist, nexus, oleander, olfactory, and panacea.

These did not all follow the general euphonious+pleasant pattern of the non-medical words; indeed few of them would conjure up pleasant thoughts, however euphonious they are; but that’s medicine for you.

I have now performed a similar analysis using lists of words that have been considered as ugly.

Lists of such supposedly “ugliest” words have been published in many websites and articles3456789101112131415 and I have combined the lists and analysed them.

These lists contain, in sum, 512 items, of which several are included in more than one list, leaving 415 unique items. Few of those that are duplicated appear in more than two different lists, suggesting that there has been little copying across the lists.

The 13 words most often included in the lists are moist and phlegm (six times each), crepuscular, ointment, and pulchritude (five times each), regurgitate and scab (four times each), and bulbous, bunion, chunk, pus, quack, and sludge (three times each).

What makes a word ugly?

The main feature of all the beautiful words I previously discussed is phonological attractiveness. Most of the beautiful words are polysyllabic—nearly 90% have two, three, or four syllables and only 24 are monosyllabic. They tend to involve the use of certain letters, such as the letter /e/ at the start of a word, the sibilant letters /s/ and soft /c/, and the liquid letters /l/ and /r/, as well as soft-sounding letters such as /m/ and /n/. Typically the vowel pattern involves different vowels from syllable to syllable (e.g. “amethyst,” “cynosure,” “imperative,” “velocity”) and the consonant pattern involves different consonants from syllable to syllable (e.g. “centesimal,” “eavesdrop,” “hallucinate,” “kaleidoscope”).

And in many cases the words on the beautiful lists also often have meanings that most would find attractive.

In contrast, many of the ugly words are monosyllabic (nearly 30%) or disyllabic (41%). They involve the use of short vowels and the harder letters of the alphabet, such as /b/, hard /c/, /d/, hard /g/, /p/, and /t/ (e.g. “baguette,” “carbuncle,” “plump,” and “troglodyte”). Although the letter /e/ is as common in ugly words (10%) as in beautiful ones (12%), it rarely comes at the start of an ugly word. And in ugly words instances of a soft /c/ or an /s/ seem to be regarded as hissing sounds rather than quiet sibilant ones (e.g. “cesspool,” “cynical,” “skunk,” “smegma”). Notably, “felicity” occurs on both the beautiful and the ugly lists, perhaps because those who attach those labels have different perceptions about how it should be pronounced.

However, the examples that people cite as examples of ugly words are governed by many other considerations. Although many of the words on the lists conjure up unpleasant thoughts (e.g. “diarrhoea,” “disgust,” “gargoyle,” “hodgepodge”) that is by no means always the case. The factors that cause them to think that certain words are ugly are often nothing to do with either phonology or unpleasant ideas. Here are some of the forms that turn them off,16 with examples:

● abbreviations: “delish,” “snafu,” “tgfi”;

● Americanisms: “chode” (a small thick penis), “hoagie” (a submarine sandwich);

● archaisms: “behoove,” “besmirch”;

● clichés: “no-brainer”;

● colloquialisms: “amazeballs,” “blooper,” “chillax”;

● fads: “bubble tea,” “shabby chic”;

● literary words: “bucolic,” “Brobdingnagian”;

● mispronunciations: “haitch”;

● portmanteau words: “frenemy,” “guesstimate,” “staycation,” “webinar”;

● redundancies: “pin number,” “pre-book,” “pre-order”;

● sexual terms: “cunnilingus,” “dildo”;

● slang: “babylicious,” “preggers,” “quack”;

● sloppy speech: “like,” as in “well I said to her, like, …”;

● twee contractions: “hubby,” “sassy”

● verbed nouns (despite the wide misconception that this is a vile modern habit): “critique”;

● vocabulary that is perceived as “woke”: “chairperson.”

In one case an individual cited “appal” as an ugly word, because he didn’t like to see his own name (Paul) appear in a word.

Ugly medical words

All this makes it hard to determine what are truly ugly medical words, or at least words that most people would regard as being ugly. Nevertheless, I have made a selection of words from the lists, words that I think are at least vaguely medical, that are not particularly euphonious, and that may or may not be outright cacophonic, but that might conjure up unpleasant thoughts:

● anus, bowel, bruise, bunion, buttock, carbuncle, chlamydia, clot, coagulate, corpse, diarrhoea, discharge, expectorate, faeces, flatulence, follicle, genitalia, gestational, haemorrhage, hoarse, honk, meatus, membrane, mucus, nasal, obese, ointment, orifice, placenta, polyp, preggers, pregnant, puberty, pubes, puke, pus, pustule, putrid, queasy, rectum, regurgitate, saliva, scab, secretion, sluice, smegma, sphincter, sputum, syphilis, syringe, vaginal, vomit, wart, wheeze, womb, zit.

Of these, bunion, ointment, phlegm, pus, and scab appear most often in various lists. I also note that “quack” appears in more than one list, although that could simply be because not only is it cacophonic, but it also conjures up the idea of an ugly duckling, rather than an ugly doctor.

In making this selection I have erred on the side of inclusiveness. Not everyone will find some of the words unpleasant in themselves; nor will they necessarily think that they are cacophonic.

A final thought

It has been reported5 that when the US philologist Willard R Espy (1910–99) was asked to compile a list of the 10 ugliest words for a book of lists his initial reaction was “I know no ugly English words. I consider them all bundles of shimmering loveliness.” Finally, however, he agreed to assemble “the most abhorrent stench of words that ever made its way to the human brain through the human nostril.”

Beauty may indeed be in the eye of the beholder, but when it comes to English words it appears that ugliness is very much in the ear and imagination of the listener.