What is the coolest word?

What are all you peoples favourite words, be it because they are strange or sound interesting? Feel free to tell us a little about them aswell.
my favourite word is "object". It sounds funny.

>>my favourite word is "object". It sounds funny. <<

Yes, especially in the sentence "Don't shoot mates, I'm a British object", uttered by James Morrill in 1863, upon meeting the first white settlers near Woodstock.

By the way, the coolest English words for me is "mushroom", especially when used as a verb, meaning "to grow as mushrooms" ("New factories have mushroomed around the city in the recent years"). The other one is "to "skyrocket", as in "The price of oil has skyrocketed in the last few days" (not that oil price rise is a good thing, though). :-)

As for the most beautiful English word, for me it is perhaps "skylark".

<<As for the most beautiful English word, for me it is perhaps "skylark">>

This is dedicated to our dear friend Easterner, our Budapest correspondent.

Courtesy of Percy Bysshe Shelley (English poet 1792-1822 who drowned while sailing off Italy).

ODE TO A SKYLARK

Hail to thee, blithe Spirit!
Bird thou never wert -
That from Heaven or near it or near it
Pourest thy full heart
In profuse strains of unpremeditated art.

Higher still and higher
From the earth thou springest.
Like a cloud of fire;
The blue deep thou wingest,
And singing still dost soar, and soaring ever singest.

In the golden lightning
Of the sunken sun
Oe'r which clouds are bright'ning,
Thou dost float and run,
Like an unbodied joy whose race is just begun.

The pale purple even
Melts around thy flight;
Like a star of Heaven,
In the broad daylight
Thou art unseen, but yet I hear thy shrill delight.

Keen as are the arrows
Of that silver sphere
Whose intense lamp narrows
In the white dawn clear,
Until we hardly see, we feel that it is there.

(These are the first 5 verses only)

You may well have seen this famous Shelley poem before dedicated to a very lovely bird. It is found all over the UK and present all the year round, but has sadly declined in numbers in recent years due to modern farming techniques and development on their favoured countryside.

William Wordsworth called the skylark an "ethereal minstrel and a pilgrim of the sky"; as you see, Shelley called the wee bird a "Blithe Spirit".

Just to the south west of Edinburgh are the Pentland Hills, with plenty of open grassland. Walking the hills you see skylarks rise up out of the grass and soar heavenwards as Shelley describes, and for ages you can still hear their warbling song way up in the sky, so high you can't see them but definitely hear them. The wee bird has an amazingly loud song for it's size.

<<it's size>> Not deliberate! sorry: read "its size". Just testing...... ;-)

One of the coolest is, no doubt, "antidisestablishmentarianism" (r something like that) that is the longest word in English (with the exception of "smiles", that has a mile between both "s").

One of my favourite words is ocean. It sounds beautiful to my ears and I like what it designates :)

Here are another couple of cool cool bird words: "drongo" and "galah". They have such a nice ring to them. Also "crunch", "clamber" and "olfactory" are cool. And don't forget "blimey" and "bindge". My fave is p'haps "conch" ... hasn't it got such a nice sound to it?

my favourtie word is "extinguish" and i also like onomatopoeic (no idea how to spell that) words like "swish" and "whisper".

also the coolest looking word is "slaughter".

To Damian,

Sorry for being a little slow to react, but I appreciated that Shelley poem a lot. Thank you! I also like Keats' "Ode to a Nightingale" (though its tone is more that of an elegy than an ode):

"Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!
No hungry generations tread thee down;
The voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown:
Perhaps the self-same song that found a path
Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,
She stood in tears amid the alien corn;
The same that ofttimes hath
Charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn."

To all,

Now we are talking about the coolest word, back in another topic somebody spoke about the competition to find the most beautiful world in German. You can read about the results at:
http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,,1373611,00.html?maca=en-kalenderblatt_topthema_englisch-347-rdf

Easterner:
No problem.....thanks for the Keats' Nightingale. That is a bird we don't see this far north....indeed, they don't go any further north than the south of England.

Some of my coolest English words:

Payday * This one's on me, Dami * We are happy to offer you the position * Your starting salary is 30k with 6 weeks' paid holiday a year *

My favorite word is a very weird one: weird. As you can see, I use it a lot. Another beautiful word is "though". Only when it is at the end of the sentences, though.

'strewth'


hands down, no arguments entered into.

No arguments here, mate. That a beauty.

isthmus, isinglass and archipelago

That's a beauty.