List Of Most Beautiful Words In The English Language

1. adroit Dexterous, agile.
2. adumbrate To very gently suggest.
3. aestivate To summer, to spend the summer.
4. ailurophile A cat-lover.
5. amaryllis Bulbous plants which have large red or pink flowers.
6. anemone Any of various plants of the buttercup family, having petal-like sepals.
7. aqua A light greenish-blue color.
8. asphodel Plants having white, pink, or yellow flowers in elongated clusters.
9. banana Herbs having a crown of large, entire leaves and a hanging cluster of fruits.
10. beatific Befitting an angel or saint.
11. beleaguer To exhaust with attacks.
12. blandiloquent Beautiful and flattering.
13. bliss
14. blossom
15. blue
16. bobolink
17. bubble
18. bumblebee
19. butterfly
20. caliginous Dark and misty.
21. camellia
22. cerulean
23. chalice
24. champagne An effervescent wine.
25. chatoyant Like a cat’s eye.
26. chattanooga
27. cherish
28. chiaroscuro The arrangement of dark and light elements in a picture.
29. chimes
30. choas The exponential divergence of two arbitrarily close points in phase space.
31. cockle A heart-shaped bivalve or a garden flower.
32. coconut
33. colporteur A book peddler.
34. conflate To blend together, to combine different things.
35. cosmopolitan
36. cozy
37. cuspidor
38. cute
39. cynosure A focal point of admiration.
40. damask
41. dawn
42. delicacy
43. destiny
44. desuetude Disuse.
45. diaphanous Filmy.
46. diffuse Spread out, not focused or concentrated.
47. dulcet Sweet, sugary.
48. ebullient Bubbling with enthusiasm.
49. effervescent Bubbly.
50. efflorescence Flowering, the opening of buds or a bloom.
51. elixir A good potion.
52. elysium Any place or state of perfect happiness; paradise.
53. emollient A softener.
54. encomium A spoken or written work in praise of someone.
55. inglenook The place beside the fireplace.
56. enthusiasm
57. ephemeral Short-lived.
58. epicure A person who enjoys fine living, especially food and drink.
59. epiphany A sudden revelation.
60. erstwhile At one time, for a time.
61. eschew To reject or avoid.
62. esculent Edible.
63. esoteric Understood only by a small group of specialists.
64. eternity
65. ethereal Gaseous, invisible but detectable.
66. etiolate White from no contact with light.
67. evanescent Vanishing quickly, lasting a very short time.
68. explosion
69. extravaganza
70. exuberant Enthusiastic, excited.
71. fantastic
72. fawn
73. felicitous Pleasing.
74. fescue A variety of grass favored for pastures.
75. flabbergasted
76. flip-flop
77. foudroyant Dazzling.
78. fragile Very, very delicate.
79. freedom
80. fugacious Running, escaping.
81. fuselage
82. galaxy
83. gambol To skip or leap about joyfully.
84. gazebo
85. giggle
86. glamour Beauty.
87. golden
88. gorgeous
89. gossamer The finest piece of thread, a spider’s silk.
90. gothic
91. grace
92. gracious
93. gum
94. halcyon Happy, sunny, care-free.
95. harbors of memory
96. hen-night
97. hiccup
98. hilarious
99. hippopotamus
100. hodgepodge
101. home
102. hope
103. hush
104. hymeneal Having to do with a wedding.
105. if
106. imbricate To overlap to form a regular pattern.
107. imbroglio An altercation or complicated situation.
108. imbue To infuse, instill.
109. incipient Beginning, in an early stage.
110. ingénue A naïve young woman.
111. inspissate To thicken.
112. inure To jade.
113. jejune Dull; childish.
114. jonquil
115. kangaroo
116. lagniappe A gift given to a customer for their patronage.
117. lagoon A small gulf or inlet in the sea.
118. languor Listlessness, inactivity.
119. lassitude Weariness, listlessness.
120. laughter The response to something funny.
121. liberty
122. lilt To move musically or lively, to have a lively sound.
123. lithe Slender and flexible.
124. lollipop
125. loquacious Talkative.
126. love
127. lovely
128. lullaby
129. luminous
130. luxuriant Thick, lavish.
131. marigold
132. meandering
133. mellifluous Sweet-sounding.
134. melody
135. mignonette
136. missive A message or letter.
137. mist
138. moiety One of two equal parts, a half.
139. moment
140. mondegreen A misanalyzed phrase.
141. mother
142. murmuring
143. myrrh
144. nebulous Foggy.
145. nevermore
146. niveous Snowy, snow-like.
147. nobility
148. obsequious Fawning, subservience.
149. odalisque A concubine in a harem.
150. oeuvre A work.
151. offing That part of the sea between the horizon and the offshore.
152. oi
153. oleander
154. onomatopoeia The creation of words by imitating sound.
155. oriole
156. paean A formal expression of praise.
157. palimpsest A manuscript written over one or more earlier ones.
158. panacea A complete solution for all problems.
159. panoply A complete set.
160. paradox
161. passion
162. pastiche A mixture of art work (art or music) from various sources.
163. pavement
164. peace
165. peccadillo A peculiarity.
166. peek-a-boo
167. pelagic Related to the sea or ocean.
168. penumbra A half-shadow, the edge of a shadow.
169. peregrination Wandering, travels.
170. petrichor The smell of earth after a rain.
171. plethora A great quantity.
172. porcelain A fine white clay pottery.
173. potamophilous Loving rivers.
174. propinquity An inclination or preference.
175. pumpkin
176. pyrrhic Victorious despite heavy losses.
177. quintessential The ultimate, the essence of the essence.
178. rainbow
179. redolent Sweet-smelling.
180. renaissance
181. rhapsody A beautiful musical piece.
182. riparian Having to do with the bank of a river or other body of water.
183. ripple A small, circular wave emanating from a central point.
184. rosemary
185. scintillate To sparkle with brilliant light.
186. sempiternal Forever and ever.
187. sentiment
188. seraglio Housing for a harem.
189. serendipity Finding something while looking for something else.
190. shenandoah
191. shipshape
192. smashing
193. smile
194. smithereens
195. soliloquy Dramatic speech intended to give the illusion of unspoken reflections.
196. sophisticated
197. summer afternoon
198. sunflower
199. sunshine
200. surreptitious Sneaky.
201. susurrus Producing a hushing sound, like flowing water.
202. sweetheart
203. sycamore
204. symbiosis Interdependence of two different species.
205. syzygy The direct opposition of two heavenly bodies.
206. talisman A symbolic object believed to have magical powers.
207. tendril
208. terpsichorean Related to dance.
209. thrush
210. tickle
211. tintinnabulation Ringing.
212. tranquil
213. tranquility
214. twinkle
215. umbrageous Shady.
216. umbrella
217. vermillion
218. vestige A small fragment.
219. whisper Speaking without vibrating the vocal folds.
220. whoops
221. wisteria
222. zing
223. zyzzyva A kind of beetle.

Writing Tips From Charles Bukowski

If I Taught Creative Writing

now, if you were teaching creative

writing, he asked, what would you

tell them?

I’d tell them to have an unhappy love

affair, hemorrhoids, bad teeth

and to drink cheap wine,

to keep switching the head of their

bed from wall to wall

and then I’d tell them to have

another unhappy love affair

and never to use a silk typewriter

ribbon,

avoid family picnics

or being photographed in a rose

garden;

read Hemingway only once,

skip Faulkner

ignore Gogol

stare at photos of Gertrude Stein

and read Sherwood Anderson in bed

while eating Ritz crackers,

realize that people who keep

talking about sexual liberation

are more frightened than you are.

listen to E. Power Biggs work the

organ on your radio while you’re

rolling Bull Durham in the dark

in a strange town

with one day left on the rent

after having given up

friends, relatives and jobs.

never consider yourself superior and /

or fair

and never try to be.

have another unhappy love affair.

watch a fly on a summer curtain.

never try to succeed.

don’t shoot pool.

be righteously angry when you

find your car has a flat tire.

take vitamins but don’t lift weights or jog.

then after all this

reverse the procedure.

have a good love affair.

and the thing

you might learn

is that nobody knows anything–

not the State, nor the mice

the garden hose or the North Star.

and if you ever catch me

teaching a creative writing class

and you read this back to me

I’ll give you a straight A

right up the pickle

barrel.

stolen from Misanthropy Today

HOW TO BE A BAD WRITER (in Ten Easy Lessons) by Langston Hughe

HOW TO BE A BAD WRITER (in Ten Easy Lessons) by Langston Hughes

1. Use all the cliches possible, such as “He had a gleam in his eye,” or “Her teeth were white as pearls.”

2. If you are a Negro, try very hard to write with an eye dead on the white market–use modern stereotypes of older stereotypes–big burly Negroes, criminals, low-lifers and prostitutes.

3. Put in a lot of profanity and as many pages as possible of near pornography and you will be so modern you pre-date Pompei in your lonely crusade toward the best seller lists. By all means, be misunderstood, unappreciated and ahead of your time in print and out, then you can be felt sorry for.

4. Never Characterize Characters. Just name them and then let them go for themselves. Let all of them talk the same way. If the reader hasn’t imagination enough to make something out of cardboard cut-outs, shame on him!

5. Write about China, Greece, Tibet, or the Argentine pampas–anyplace you’ve never seen and know nothing about. Never write about anything you know, your hometown, or your home folks, or yourself.

6. Have nothing to say, but use a great many words, particularly high-sounding words, to say it.

7. If a playwright, put into your script a lot of hand-waving and spirituals, preferably the ones everybody has heard a thousand times from Marion Anderson to the Golden Gates.

8. If a poet, rhyme June with moon as often and in as many ways as possible. Also, use thee’s and thou’s and ’tis and o’er, and invert your sentences all the time. Never say “The sun rose, bright and shining.” But, rather, “Bright and shining rose the sun.”

9. Pay no attention really to spelling or grammar or the neatness of the manuscript. And in writing letters, never sign your name so anyone can read it. A rapid scrawl will better indicate how important and how busy you are.

10. Drink as much liquor as possible and always write under the influence of alcohol. When you can’t afford alcohol yourself, or even if you can, drink on your friends, fans and the general public.

If you are white, there are many more things I can advise in order to be a bad writer, but since this piece is for colored writers, there are some things I know a Negro just will not do not even for writing’s sake, so there is no use mentioning them.

Originally published in The Harlem Quarterly (ed. John Henrik Clarke), 1950.

Writing Tools: Figures Of Speech

To write well you must speak well, or at least know what good speaking sounds like. Here’s the building blocks to that, at least knowing what these figures of speech are called so that you may draw from them– AF

Figures of Speech

Figures of speech are expressions that stretch words beyond their literal meanings. By connecting or juxtaposing different sounds and thoughts, figures of speech increase the breadth and subtlety of expression.

Alliteration: The repetition of similar sounds, usually consonants, at the beginning of words. For example, Robert Frost’s poem “Out, out—” contains the alliterative phrase “sweet scented stuff.”

Aposiopesis: A breaking-off of speech, usually because of rising emotion or excitement. For example, “Touch me one more time, and I swear—”

Apostrophe: A direct address to an absent or dead person, or to an object, quality, or idea. Walt Whitman’s poem “O Captain, My Captain,” written upon the death of Abraham Lincoln, is an example of apostrophe.

Assonance: The repetition of similar vowel sounds in a sequence of nearby words. For example, Alfred, Lord Tennyson creates assonance with the “o” sound in this line from “The Lotos-Eaters”: “All day the wind breathes low with mellower tone.”

Cacophony: The clash of discordant or harsh sounds within a sentence or phrase. Cacophony is a familiar feature of tongue twisters but can also be used to poetic effect, as in the words “anfractuous rocks” in T. S. Eliot’s “Sweeney Erect.” Although dissonance has a different musical meaning, it is sometimes used interchangeably with “cacophony.”

Chiasmus: Two phrases in which the syntax is the same but the placement of words is reversed, as in these lines from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “The Pains of Sleep”: “To be beloved is all I need, / And whom I love, I love indeed.”

Cliché: An expression such as “turn over a new leaf” that has been used so frequently it has lost its expressive power.

Colloquialism: An informal expression or slang, especially in the context of formal writing, as in Philip Larkin’s “Send No Money”: “All the other lads there / Were itching to have a bash.”

Conceit: An elaborate parallel between two seemingly dissimilar objects or ideas. The metaphysical poets (see Literary Movements, below) are especially known for their conceits, as in John Donne’s “The Flea.”

Epithet: An adjective or phrase that describes a prominent feature of a person or thing. “Richard ‘the Lionheart’ ” and “ ‘Shoeless’ Joe Jackson” are both examples of epithets.

Euphemism: The use of decorous language to express vulgar or unpleasant ideas, events, or actions. For example, “passed away” instead of “died”; “ethnic cleansing” instead of “genocide.”

Euphony: A pleasing arrangement of sounds. Many consider “cellar door” one of the most euphonious phrases in English.

Hyperbole: An excessive overstatement or conscious exaggeration of fact: “I’ve told you about it a million times already.”

Idiom: A common expression that has acquired a meaning that differs from its literal meaning, such as “it’s raining cats and dogs” or “a bolt from the blue.”

Litotes: A form of understatement in which a statement is affirmed by negating its opposite: “He is not unfriendly.”

Meiosis: Intentional understatement, as, for example, in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, when Mercutio is mortally wounded and says it is only “a scratch.” Meiosis is the opposite of hyperbole and often employs litotes to ironic effect.

Metaphor: The comparison of one thing to another that does not use the terms “like” or “as.” Shakespeare is famous for his metaphors, as in Macbeth: “Life is but a walking shadow, a poor player / That struts and frets his hour upon the stage.”

• Mixed metaphor: A combination of metaphors that produces a confused or contradictory image, such as “The company’s collapse left mountains of debt in its wake.”

Metonymy: The substitution of one term for another that generally is associated with it. For example, “suits” instead of “businessmen.”

Onomatopoeia: The use of words, such as “pop,” “hiss,” and “boing,” that sound like the thing they refer to.

Oxymoron: The association of two contrary terms, as in the expressions “same difference” or “wise fool.”

Paradox: A statement that seems absurd or even contradictory on its face but often expresses a deeper truth. For example, a line in Oscar Wilde’s “The Ballad of Reading Gaol”: “And all men kill the thing they love.”

Paralipsis: Also known as praeteritio, the technique of drawing attention to something by claiming not to mention it. For example, from Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick: “We will not speak of all Queequeg’s peculiarities here; how he eschewed coffee and hot rolls, and applied his undivided attention to beefsteaks, done rare.”

Parallelism: The use of similar grammatical structures or word order in two sentences or phrases to suggest a comparison or contrast between them. In Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 129”: “Before, a joy proposed; behind, a dream.” Parallelism also can refer to parallels between larger elements in a narrative (see Literary Techniques, below).

Pathetic fallacy: The attribution of human feeling or motivation to a nonhuman object, especially an object found in nature. For example, John Keats’s “Ode to Melancholy” describes a “weeping” cloud.

Periphrasis: An elaborate and roundabout manner of speech that uses more words than necessary. Saying “I appear to be entirely without financial resources” instead of “I’m broke” is an example. Euphemisms often employ periphrasis.

Personification: The use of human characteristics to describe animals, things, or ideas. Carl Sandburg’s poem “Chicago” describes the city as “Stormy, husky, brawling, / City of the Big Shoulders.”

Pun: A play on words that exploits the similarity in sound between two words with distinctly different meanings. For example, the title of Oscar Wilde’s play The Importance of Being Earnest is a pun on the word “earnest,” which means “serious or sober,” and the name “Ernest,” which figures into a scheme that some of the play’s main characters perpetrate.

Rhetorical question: A question that is asked not to elicit a response but to make an impact or call attention to something. For example, the question “Isn’t she great?” expresses regard for another person and does not call for discussion.

Sarcasm: A simple form of verbal irony (see Literary Techniques, below) in which it is obvious from context and tone that the speaker means the opposite of what he or she says. Sarcasm usually, but not always, expresses scorn. Commenting “That was graceful” when someone trips and falls is an example.

Simile: A comparison of two things through the use of “like” or “as.” The title of Robert Burns’s poem “My Love Is Like a Red, Red Rose” is a simile.

Synaesthesia: The use of one kind of sensory experience to describe another, such as in the line “Heard melodies are sweet” in John Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn.”

Synecdoche: A form of metonymy in which a part of an entity is used to refer to the whole, for example, “my wheels” for “my car.”

Trope: A category of figures of speech that extend the literal meanings of words by inviting a comparison to other words, things, or ideas. Metaphor, metonymy, and simile are three common tropes.

Zeugma: The use of one word in a sentence to modify two other words in the sentence, typically in two different ways. For example, in Charles Dickens’s The Pickwick Papers, the sentence “Mr. Pickwick took his hat and his leave” uses the word “took” to mean two different things.

How To Write With Style, By Kurt Vonnegut

How to Write With Style

by Kurt Vonnegut

Newspaper reporters and technical writers are trained to reveal almost nothing about themselves in their writings. This makes them freaks in the world of writers, since almost all of the other ink-stained wretches in that world reveal a lot about themselves to readers. We call these revelations, accidental and intentional, elements of style.

These revelations tell us as readers what sort of person it is with whom we are spending time. Does the writer sound ignorant or informed, stupid or bright, crooked or honest, humorless or playful– ? And on and on.

Why should you examine your writing style with the idea of improving it? Do so as a mark of respect for your readers, whatever you’re writing. If you scribble your thoughts any which way, your readers will surely feel that you care nothing about them. They will mark you down as an egomaniac or a chowderhead — or, worse, they will stop reading you.

The most damning revelation you can make about yourself is that you do not know what is interesting and what is not. Don’t you yourself like or dislike writers mainly for what they choose to show you or make you think about? Did you ever admire an emptyheaded writer for his or her mastery of the language? No.

So your own winning style must begin with ideas in your head.

1. Find a subject you care about

Find a subject you care about and which you in your heart feel others should care about. It is this genuine caring, and not your games with language, which will be the most compelling and seductive element in your style.

I am not urging you to write a novel, by the way — although I would not be sorry if you wrote one, provided you genuinely cared about something. A petition to the mayor about a pothole in front of your house or a love letter to the girl next door will do.

2. Do not ramble, though

I won’t ramble on about that.

3. Keep it simple

As for your use of language: Remember that two great masters of language, William Shakespeare and James Joyce, wrote sentences which were almost childlike when their subjects were most profound. “To be or not to be?” asks Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The longest word is three letters long. Joyce, when he was frisky, could put together a sentence as intricate and as glittering as a necklace for Cleopatra, but my favorite sentence in his short story “Eveline” is this one: “She was tired.” At that point in the story, no other words could break the heart of a reader as those three words do.

Simplicity of language is not only reputable, but perhaps even sacred. The Bible opens with a sentence well within the writing skills of a lively fourteen-year-old: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.”

4. Have guts to cut

It may be that you, too, are capable of making necklaces for Cleopatra, so to speak. But your eloquence should be the servant of the ideas in your head. Your rule might be this: If a sentence, no matter how excellent, does not illuminate your subject in some new and useful way, scratch it out.

5. Sound like yourself

The writing style which is most natural for you is bound to echo the speech you heard when a child. English was Conrad’s third language, and much that seems piquant in his use of English was no doubt colored by his first language, which was Polish. And lucky indeed is the writer who has grown up in Ireland, for the English spoken there is so amusing and musical. I myself grew up in Indianapolis, where common speech sounds like a band saw cutting galvanized tin, and employs a vocabulary as unornamental as a monkey wrench.

In some of the more remote hollows of Appalachia, children still grow up hearing songs and locutions of Elizabethan times. Yes, and many Americans grow up hearing a language other than English, or an English dialect a majority of Americans cannot understand.

All these varieties of speech are beautiful, just as the varieties of butterflies are beautiful. No matter what your first language, you should treasure it all your life. If it happens to not be standard English, and if it shows itself when your write standard English, the result is usually delightful, like a very pretty girl with one eye that is green and one that is blue.

I myself find that I trust my own writing most, and others seem to trust it most, too, when I sound most like a person from Indianapolis, which is what I am. What alternatives do I have? The one most vehemently recommended by teachers has no doubt been pressed on you, as well: to write like cultivated Englishmen of a century or more ago.

6. Say what you mean

I used to be exasperated by such teachers, but am no more. I understand now that all those antique essays and stories with which I was to compare my own work were not magnificent for their datedness or foreignness, but for saying precisely what their authors meant them to say. My teachers wished me to write accurately, always selecting the most effective words, and relating the words to one another unambiguously, rigidly, like parts of a machine. The teachers did not want to turn me into an Englishman after all. They hoped that I would become understandable — and therefore understood. And there went my dream of doing with words what Pablo Picasso did with paint or what any number of jazz idols did with music. If I broke all the rules of punctuation, had words mean whatever I wanted them to mean, and strung them together higgledy-piggledy, I would simply not be understood. So you, too, had better avoid Picasso-style or jazz-style writing, if you have something worth saying and wish to be understood.

Readers want our pages to look very much like pages they have seen before. Why? This is because they themselves have a tough job to do, and they need all the help they can get from us.

7. Pity the readers

They have to identify thousands of little marks on paper, and make sense of them immediately. They have to read, an art so difficult that most people don’t really master it even after having studied it all through grade school and high school — twelve long years.

So this discussion must finally acknowledge that our stylistic options as writers are neither numerous nor glamorous, since our readers are bound to be such imperfect artists. Our audience requires us to be sympathetic and patient readers, ever willing to simplify and clarify — whereas we would rather soar high above the crowd, singing like nightingales.

That is the bad news. The good news is that we Americans are governed under a unique Constitution, which allows us to write whatever we please without fear of punishment. So the most meaningful aspect of our styles, which is what we choose to write about, is utterly unlimited.

8. For really detailed advice

For a discussion of literary style in a narrower sense, in a more technical sense, I recommend to your attention The Elements of Style, by William Strunk, Jr. and E.B. White. E.B. White is, of course, one of the most admirable literary stylists this country has so far produced.

You should realize, too, that no one would care how well or badly Mr. White expressed himself, if he did not have perfectly enchanting things to say.

In Sum:

1. Find a subject you care about

2. Do not ramble, though

3. Keep it simple

4. Have guts to cut

5. Sound like yourself

6. Say what you mean

7. Pity the readers