The Most Beautiful Word

What do you think is the most beautiful word in the English language? Oh, my gosh.

Well, it's my favorite word, which is defenestration, but it's not beautiful.

especially not for the person who's going out the window.

Yeah, it's often associated with a negative outcome.

I've always thought plenipotentiary has a nice ring to it.

It's a gig I wouldn't mind having, but I think the most beautiful word in the language is barely even English, and it's onomatopoeia.

The Poetry Society of America asked its 1,500 or so members recently to vote on what they thought was the most beautiful word in English, defining beautiful however one wishes, I suppose.

These being poets and readers of poetry, I think they tended to focus on the way words sound.

What do you think they chose? Hint, it was not defenestration.

It was not onomatopoeia.

It's not that it's an infinite number of possibilities, but it's a large number.

Daffodil.

They chose diaphanous.

What does that mean?

I think it means a sort of not very sharp kind of light that suffuses the view in front of you and makes the thing you're peering at look like it has soft, even translucent edges.

You're on the right track, though it's not the light itself that is diaphanous, it's whatever the light is passing through.

It's typically said of fabric that's sheer or translucent.

So the word originates in Greek, and if you break it down into its Greek roots, you get the P-H-A-N part, which is to show or appear.

That's the same P-H-A-N in phantom or phantasm.

And then the D-I-A, the dia part is through, so showing through.

In other words, what we would call translucent or transparent.

And that's what the word meant in Greek.

Latin borrowed it from Greek, and then the Romance languages all adapted it from Latin.

So before the word ever shows up in English, it was already in Italian and Spanish and Portuguese as diaphano, and it was in French as diaphan.

Which, by the way, sounds like a Pokemon character, but let's never mind that.