We’re all word people right? So which is your favorite word in the whole wide language? Surely you have one.
Mine is archipelago.
Take it away, word people!
Nathan Bransford | Writing, Book Editing, Publishing
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Cantaloupe
and
Noodle
(I must be hungry.)
Delicious.
You can pair this with almost anything and it makes a sentence extraordinary.
Like are you serious, isn’t every word your favourite.
Too many for just one word:
Dearth
Ubiquitous
Mayhap
Salmonella
Opalescent
Omnipotence
Penultimate
Paraplegic
Trapezoid
Zygote
Polymorphism
Myriad
Canny
Licentious
Bleak
Can’t decide on one yet. But I hear that George W. favors:
STRATEGERY
have a few:
heinous
dodecahedron
wench
exsanguinate
Took me a while, ’cause I like so many words. But I wanted to add another vote for discombobulate.
I still remember the first and second times I heard that word … they were exactly a year apart, to the day. And they were both spoken by women as they exited bathrooms.
My dad and I used to say, “discombooberate” … we thought we were hilarious.
SPIZZERINCTUM:
N., The energy and will to succeed. I.e., what the Little Engine had.
SQUIMSHED:
The word used when none other will suffice. “How was being Maid of Honor when your ex-boyfriend married your mother?”
“yes”
danny bloom
Tufts 1971
Nathan,
I have been overanalyzing this question for far too long.
At first I was thinking you wanted written words, but then there would be the difficulty of trying to avoid being redundant by using a favored word too frequently.
Then, well, I realized perhaps you wanted to know what words people liked to say aloud.
After much consideration, I realize that I love saying Yiddish words the best. They have such character.
schmooze
schmutz
schmata
schlep
schtup
and schmuck
All seem to garnish a phrase.
And my husband’s favorite word is “spork.”
Not certain it’s my favorite word, but it did immediately come to mind:
Inconceivable!
(“You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”)
Hilarious.
You have to grin just to say it, and other people start cracking up, too, before they even know what you’re talking about. It’s magical and everyday.
But archipelago, discombobulated, and perspicacious have long been up there. And ubiquitous, thanks to Charles Dickens.
I’m astonished to see how many people love my friend’s second favorite word: defenestrate. Her first favorite is palimpsest. That mark on old parchment where you can see something has been erased and written over.
In Chinese, I like ho hui. Regret. You look at the way it’s written (ho is backward, and hui has word parts for heart and mother, but also reminds me of gray and ash, and ocean). Something about the sound and the sense, and the sight, gives me a shiver. Ho hui.
I once heard that only 50 or 100 Chinese words get used over and over to make up 80% of Chinese poetry, because they have such poetic force. I’ve always imagined ho hui was one.
Oh my! I agree with Erik. How can I pick just one. All the other words will be jealous and might shun me. That would be catastrophic. Haha!
That said–there have been some excellent ones listed here!
I see it’s already here… but that just PROVES what an awesome word it is.
Phantasmagorical.
And here’s a great quote demonstrating its meaning in the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary.
“An opium-eater’s revery is nothing to the phantasmagoria of the sky tonight.” E.K. Kane
Junkbox. It has such a complexity of consonant sounds, it may as well not have vowels. Wait, does this qualify as one word?
Mellifluous,
flabbergasted,
and recalcitrance.
Cauterize
-and-
Anomaly
Dear Nathan,
What funnnn, here, reading favorites!
Thanks!
Mine at this moment in this early morning are simple words
love
giggle
🙂
smorgasbord
and
NIGGA