What’s the most beautiful word in the English language? Some say that it’s “mother,” others that it’s “love”—both for their euphony and for the unexplainable tug at the heart that each of them makes. In a 1967 novel, however, writer Norman Mailer wrote that a committee of Language Hump-type professors had made the finding that the most beautiful word in English is “cellardoor,” spelled as only one word. And in 1963, the novelist C. S. Lewis obliquely confirmed this finding when he wrote: “I was astonished when someone first showed that by writing
cellar door as
Selladore, one produces an enchanting proper name.”
In his On Language piece “Cellar Door” in the February 11, 2010 issue of
The New York Times Magazine, Grant Barrett, editorial director of the online dictionary Wordnik and host of the radio program “A Way With Words,” lovingly dwells on the magic of “cellar door” and how it has bewitched English word-lovers over the years—even to the point of one of them founding a
cellar door fan club. Barrett’s conclusion? “Despite more than a century of elusive commentary on this topic,” he says, “the only door we can identify with certainty is the open one through which those trying to investigate the matter have haplessly fallen. If you rely also on meaning, maybe
closed cellar door is the more beautiful choice.”
Read Grant Barrett’s “Cellar Door” in The New York Times Magazine now!
