AILSA CHANG, HOST:
OK, Juana, what do you think is the most beautiful word in the English language?
JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
Hard question, but I think I'm going to go with euphoria. What do you think?
CHANG: Ooh. I like that. I think I would say onomatopoeia. Well, recently, over a thousand poets and poetry enthusiasts weighed in on this very question. And the word that they have crowned the most beautiful word in the English language is...
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ESTEBAN TOUMA: Diaphanous. It's an adjective that describes something very delicate to the point of being almost transparent.
CHANG: Diaphanous. That was Esteban Touma, a linguist and cultural expert at Babbel. The language-learning platform created a short list of 20 beautiful sounding words, and then they asked the Poetry Society of America's 1,500 members to vote for the most beautiful from that list.
SUMMERS: Diaphanous got the highest percentage of votes, followed by ethereal, then mellifluous.
CHANG: Now, behind this survey is a whole area of study called phonaesthetics, basically looking at the key ingredients for ear-pleasing words.
TOUMA: How the words flow - are they easy to pronounce? We looked at vowel quality. Open vowels are usually more associated with pleasant sounding words. We take diaphanous. Quite literally, your mouth is a little bit more open and air is kind of flowing directly out.
SUMMERS: OK. So poets like the way diaphanous sounds, but how often are they using the word?
CHANG: Well, we asked Matt Brogan that very question. He's the executive director of the Poetry Society of America, and he had just finished browsing the poetry databases.
MATT BROGAN: The actual answer is not very often. And I think this speaks to something about poets. I think they're very attuned to the kinds of things we're talking about, but they're also a little bit wary of things that feel conventionally beautiful, in the same way an artist might be a little wary of, like, making a painting of a sunset or boats in a harbor.
SUMMERS: Survey participants also had the opportunity to nominate their own words.
CHANG: Now, just because a word sounds beautiful doesn't necessarily mean that it means something beautiful.
BROGAN: Diphtheria is a really lovely sounding word. It's probably not something you want to get.
SUMMERS: Brogan says one of his big takeaways from the survey is that native English speakers tend to look to other languages to find beauty.
BROGAN: I do think that there is a bit of sound envy for native English speakers for the romance languages - like French or Italian or Spanish - that feel to us that they are just flowing along in a way that maybe we don't necessarily think about English doing in a natural kind of way.
CHANG: Well, Juana, in the interest of using more beautiful words in conversation, I just want to say, I so appreciate the sound of your mellifluous voice.
SUMMERS: Aw, thanks (laughter).
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