What the loveliest word in the English language?

The following article is taken from the 'mind your language' blog on The Guardian, what do you think? What's the loveliest word in the English language? Here are some suggestions. Now we'd like to hear yours It was the linguist JR Firth who, in 1930, coined the term phonoaesthetics to refer to the study of how words sound. I came across it recently when, 26 years later than most, I heard Marlow ask in Dennis Potter's The Singing Detective: "What's the loveliest word in the English language, officer? In the sound it makes in the mouth? In the shape it makes in the page? E-L-B-O-W." (And yes, for anyone else who didn't know, it is where the band got its name.) The film Donnie Darko offers a tip of its hat, too, in the lines of Drew Barrymore's character, teacher Karen Pomeroy: "This famous linguist once said that of all the phrases in the English language, of all the endless combinations of words in all of history, 'cellar door' is the most beautiful." The famous linguist was none other than JRR Tolkien, and he made the claim in his 1955 lecture English and Welsh. There's also Robert Beard's The 100 Most Beautiful Words in English. Although you're unlikely to agree with them all, Beard's list does help make some phonetic links: the B and L common to bungalow, elbow and one of my favourites, for example. Long vowels and liquid sounds such as L and R have been considered particularly beautiful since the ancient Greeks, but I'd love to know where B fits in. So, in no particular order, here are five that for me illustrate Tolkien's description of the phonetic pleasure of words as "simpler, deeper-rooted, and yet more immediate" than any practical or structural understanding of their sense. cwtch Beautiful and useful, it fills the space created by my loathing of the word cuddle or the even more egregious snuggle. (A chap who asked if I "fancied a snuggle?" once had the same effect on my libido as salt on slugs.) Admittedly it's not English - Tolkien also believed "cellar doors" to be more frequent in Welsh - but, as none of the Welsh friends from whom I learned it were Welsh-speakers, it's in. kecks First heard used with a provocative wiggle ("Do you like my new kecks?") by a lad from Leeds on whom I had a crush. Both kecks and cwtch possess a splash of nostalgia (not least for the days of maintenance grants, which allowed word-lovers to mudlark further afield) but I love their sound, too: short, punchy, and based on the voiceless velar stop. K, however, was considered one of the least beautiful sounds by the ancient Greeks, so perhaps it's a personal quirk. beetroot No liquid sounds here, either, but B makes a reappearance. A down-to-earth word with no time for fripperies. I suspect menus that describe it as "creamy" miss the point. Unlike a red, red rose, beetroot illustrates Paul Claudel's belief that "to beware adjectives is the beginning of style". rococo Closer to a classical sense of phonetic beauty, it's as smooth and chubby as a cherub. And finally (those Bs and Ls again) - balalaika A word as sensuous as a single malt. I never did get to kiss the boy in the corduroys but, if I had, I'm sure it would have been as lovely as "balalaika". Harriet Powney blogs at http://lasoeurlumiere.wordpress.com/ • This article was amended on 25 May 2012. In the original version, cwtch was misspelled as cwch. http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/mind-your-language/2012/may/25/mind-your-language-loveliest-word?INTCMP=SRCH [Accessed 4th December 2012]