This article, from the Sydney Morning Herald, was sent in Anu's weekly AWADmail this week:

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Mums take heart. The most beautiful word in English is mother. But father doesn't even make the top 70.

To celebrate its 70th anniversary, the British Council compiled a list of the 70 most beautiful words in a survey of more than 42,000 people from 102 non-English speaking countries. About 7000 English students in the council's schools were quizzed directly; the rest responded to an on-line poll.

Filling out the top 10 were, in order: passion, smile, love, eternity, fantastic, destiny, freedom, liberty and tranquillity. Down the list were peace at 11, serendipity (24), pumpkin (40), lollipop (42), bumblebee (44), peekaboo (48), kangaroo (50), whoops (56), oi (61), hodgepodge (64), fuselage (67) and
hen-night (70).

Only one of the words, cherish (16), was a verb that could not be used as a noun. Mother was the only word that described a relationship between people.

Professor Anna Wierzbicka, of the School of Modern Languages at the Australian National University, suggests that people voted for the top five not so much because they like the words themselves, but because they value the concepts they represent. They would probably have voted for the equivalent words in any language. "For example, when they say passion, they are not really thinking about the English language, they are thinking about things they value in life."

But she says some of the words express concepts that are specific to English, and do not necessarily have exact equivalents in other languages. "For example liberty or freedom. Perhaps even destiny. There are many languages, like Australian Aboriginal languages or Japanese, which wouldn't have words like liberty or freedom."

When we get to hippopotamus (52) or flip-flop (59), however, people seem to be deciding more on the basis of sound than meaning. "But something like hen-night they like not because of its sound, but because they think it's an amusing idea, and they like the amusing idea. And possibly the way this idea is expressed. It's a kind of jocular expression."

Carmella Hollo, a linguistics lecturer at the University of NSW, says a similar survey was conducted of native speakers in 1980 by The Sunday Times, and the top words were melody, velvet, gossamer, crystal, and autumn.

She says people are generally thought to favour words with m, l, r and n sounds, and to dislike f sounds. This may partly explain why mother tops the list, yet father doesn't rate a mention.

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I dunno about y'all, but native speaker or not, I'd be hard-pressed to come up with a single "most beautiful" word, whether we mean to sound of the word itself or the concept it symbolizes.

http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/11/25/1101219683777.html?oneclick=true

The primary source: http://www.britishcouncil.org/