500 Beautiful Words You Should Know

Introduction

The first question that arises, of course, is ‘What makes a beautiful word?’ Or, if you prefer, ‘What makes a word beautiful?’ Any answer to either question is going to be subjective.

A few years ago, I wrote a book called 500 Words You Should Know and said in its introduction that I had chosen the words entirely on the basis of having thought, ‘Ooh, that’s a nice word.’ With ‘beautiful’ words I have tried to be a bit more specific. Yes, there are plenty that trip off the tongue beautifully – AMBROSIA, CELESTIAL, MELLIFLUOUS – and many more that satisfy the desire we all occasionally feel to sound clever – ASSEVERATE, CYNOSURE, RECIDIVIST. But the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) gives a secondary definition of ‘beautiful’ – not pleasing to the sight or other physical senses, but ‘pleasing to the mind, especially in being appropriate or well suited to a particular purpose’. This gives me the opportunity to include words that are especially apt for their function, that mean what they sound as if they ought to mean and are pleasing as a result. In 1880, Sir James Murray, the first editor of the OED, coined the term ‘echoic’ for this sort of thing: his dictionary uses it ‘to describe formations that echo the sound which they are intended to denote or symbolize’. Examples that I have included are FLIBBERTIGIBBET, GUFFAW, TWADDLE and – perhaps extending the OED’s definition a little to suit my own purposes – ADAMANT, DOLLOP and FILIGREE.

Moving on, you will find words for when you need to let off steam or to tell someone who has annoyed you what you think of them, such as APOPLECTIC, CATACLYSM and, one of my real favourites, FUSTIAN. Again, these may not be beautiful in the most conventional sense of the word, but goodness they make you feel better.

Shorter chapters encompass words that make you laugh, or at least smile, when you say them, of which perhaps the greatest is BORBORYGMUS, the noise produced by a rumbling gut; and words for things you didn’t know there was a word for, in which you will go a long way to beat CHARIVARI, a discordant mock serenade made to newlyweds.

But when all is said and done, beauty is in the eye (or, perhaps in this context, the ear) of the beholder. I’ve chosen these words because I like them – and I hope you will too.

Caroline Taggart

September 2020

CHAPTER ONE

Words That Are Perfect for Their Meaning

A ‘beautiful’ word doesn’t have to be long and flowing; sometimes it just has to be fit for purpose. The English language is blessed with lots of short, sharp words representing short, sharp actions, soft-sounding words for soft things and others that simply feel right. Here are a few.

accost

To go up and speak to someone, normally in a public place: ‘A woman accosted me in the street and asked me to sample a new brand of yoghurt.’ From an Old French word with various meanings to do with nearness, especially of a ship travelling close to the coast.

adamant

A hard-sounding word for a hard concept: if you’re adamant about something you are convinced that it is true and you’re not going to change your mind at any price. It derives from the name of an otherwise unidentified rock or mineral, sometimes confused with a diamond, and legendary for its hardness and impenetrability; both can probably trace their origins back to the Greek for ‘unconquerable’.

amalgam

A mixture or blend, originally a combination of mercury and another metal, formerly used in dental fillings. Now it can be a mixture of almost anything: ‘His character was an amalgam of patience and good humour.’ The verb to amalgamate is often used to designate the merging of two or more businesses and the result is not an amalgam but an amalgamation.

amorphous

Anything with morph in it is likely to be about shape, as in Franz Kafka’s 1915 novella The Metamorphosis, in which the protagonist wakes up to find he has changed into an enormous insect; or in the sort of film where an unassuming personage morphs into a superhero. Amorphous, therefore, means lacking in a clearly defined shape, having no particular style or characteristics: ‘I was trying to paint a cloudy sky, but it came out as an amorphous grey blob.’

askance

To view someone or something askance is literally to look at them at an angle, from an OBLIQUE perspective, but it’s normally used in the metaphorical sense of to be disapproving, to distrust them: ‘The board looked askance at the new CEO’s plans for restructuring.’ Of uncertain origin, but perhaps ultimately from the Latin for ‘as if’ and therefore loosely related to QUASI.

bagatelle

A pretty word for a pretty little thing: something decorative but of minimal significance – very often used in the expression a mere bagatelle. The name can also be applied to a short piece of piano music, the most famous being that staple of children’s piano lessons, Beethoven’s Für Elise. And there is a game called bagatelle which takes various forms – it can be a sort of bar billiards, or something played on a board with a spring-like handle, a miniature pinball machine. Bagatelle comes from an Italian term for ‘a little property’ (related to bag and baggage), but the game takes its name from the Château de Bagatelle, a pleasure garden on the fringes of Paris, where the bar-billiards version was first played in the time of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette.

bedraggled

There’s an infrequently used word draggle, which means to drag something through water or mud; as a result, it becomes bedraggled. It’s the way you look when you’ve just come in out of the rain: your clothes are wet and dirty, and your hair is hanging limply around your ears. You’ll probably want a towel for the dog, too.

blitz

The German for ‘lightning’, this entered English usage during the Second World War as an abbreviation of blitzkrieg, ‘lightning war’, the term used for the campaign of concentrated bombing attacks on British cities in 1940 and 1941. The Blitz, with a capital B, refers to that period, but in all lower case it has come to mean a less murderous form of hectic activity: you can have a blitz on the housework, for example, or a blitz on the filing – a short, focused assault on something you’ve probably been neglecting for a while. See also FLAK.

brook

Not the babbling kind, but the verb that means to tolerate, to put up with. It originally meant to enjoy the use of, to benefit from and was often found in legal contexts; nowadays it is generally used with a negative in expressions such as ‘He will brook no delay – he says it’s urgent’ or ‘He will brook no opposition – we’ve got to do it his way.’ There’s a mock-heroic tone to this word, so it’s probably best not to use it unless you intend to be slightly sarcastic.

brunt

A short, sharp blow or sudden attack, or the impact of it. Often used in a figurative sense: ‘I had borne the brunt of his bad temper for years.’ Of unknown origin, though it’s tempting to fantasize that it’s a combination of a blow and the resulting grunt.

cacophony

A loud or unpleasant noise, particularly a discordant mixture of badly tuned instruments, or voices at a meeting where tempers are fraying. Caco- comes from the Greek for ‘bad’ and gives us a number of other unpleasant concepts – including a cacotopia, a place where everything is as bad as it can possibly be, even worse than a dystopia; and cacology, a bad choice of words or poor pronunciation. See also KAKISTOCRACY.

capacious

Roomy, full of capacity and therefore able to carry lots of things. In Oscar Wilde’s 1895 play The Importance of Being Earnest, Miss Prism describes her famous handbag as ‘old, but capacious’: in what she refers to as a moment of mental abstraction, she was able to put a baby into it, so it must have been capacious indeed.

caper

As a verb, to dance or prance about, to behave playfully; as a noun, a movement of that kind or a prank, an escapade: ‘He should have been home hours ago, so he must be up to some caper or other.’ It can trace its origins back to the Latin for ‘a goat’ (as in the zodiac sign Capricorn); nothing to do with the caper you might find on a pizza, which is the flower bud of a Mediterranean shrub whose name is Greek in origin.

cherish

To hold dear and to care for accordingly, to treasure. In traditional versions of the Christian marriage service, the partners promise to love and cherish each other, but you can also cherish an idea: ‘He cherished the hope that one day he would be able to visit Antarctica.’ Related to the French cher/chère and chéri(e), meaning ‘dear’.

craw

Literally the crop of a bird, the pouch at the top of the digestive tract where food is stored and digestion begins. So, if a human says that something stuck in their craw, it means they couldn’t stomach it, really resented it: ‘It sticks in my craw that she should have got such good marks, when she didn’t do nearly as much work as I did.’

crestfallen

If a rooster’s crest – his crowning glory – were to fall or droop, he would look crestfallen: woebegone, disappointed, dejected. The word can be used of people, too, whether or not they have crests: ‘He was crestfallen when the rally was cancelled: he’d been looking forward to it all year.’ It’s possible also to be chap-fallen or chop-fallen when your chaps or chops, on either side of your jaw, droop – again with disappointment or misery.

defunct

Dead, no longer in existence, no longer functioning. It was formerly used of a deceased person in the way we now usually use late, such as the defunct duke, uncle of the present one. Nowadays it’s more often applied to institutions, periodicals and the like: the defunct Social Democratic Party or the defunct Today newspaper.

despondent

Lacking in hope – not quite despairing, but discouraged and dispirited. Lord Chesterfield, the eighteenth-century aristocrat known for his instructive letters to his son, advised against this feeling: ‘Aim at perfection … they who aim at it, and persevere, will come much nearer [to] it than those whose laziness and despondency make them give it up as unattainable.’

diffident

Shy, lacking faith in yourself – from the same Latin root as fidelity and confident. You might be a diffident person, have a diffident nature or make a diffident remark if you didn’t think anyone wanted to hear