As I told the Albany Times Union, this ickiness can have to do with slimy stuff, bodily discharge, or other things that people would prefer not to think about. Why does moist merit a Facebook group of haters, while hoist and joist go unnnoticed? It's more than just the sound of the word: the disliked words tend to have some basic level of ickiness.

But much like the enjoyable words on the 'favorites' list like serendipity and mellifluous, there's a certain sound/sense combination that sparks these word aversions. It's difficult to find any unifying thread for these words that get people's goat. One Facebooker calls moist 'possibly the worst word in the English dictionary,' while another says, 'I despise the sick, repugnant word!' It's hard to top the aversion felt for moist, but some other 'least favorites' can provoke similar reactions: panty/panties, vomit, ointment, and slacks. Many people feel quite strongly about moist - there's even a Facebook group called ' I HATE the word MOIST!' with more than 300 members. The word that comes next on the 'least favorite' leaderboard is moist. Overuse is also to blame for the appearance of whatever, nice, and awesome among the least favorite words. Meanwhile, people who dislike like think it's, like, overused. No and impossible are words that anyone with a can-do spirit would want to avoid. The runners-up are no, like, and impossible. Among our subscribers, the word that appears most often as 'least favorite' is hate - not surprising, since it's often paired with the overall favorite love.

Such words might inspire warm feelings, but they don't hold a candle to the visceral reaction that many people have for certain disliked words. That winning combination of enjoyable sound and sense is identifiable in some other highly liked words: pulchritude, eclectic, Schadenfreude, perspicacious, mellifluous, syzygy, discombobulate, and lagniappe. It's interesting that serendipity ranks so highly, but its appeal is self-evident: it has a distinctive and engaging meaning ('good luck in making unexpected and fortunate discoveries'), and it's also fun to say. This is followed by the similarly feel-good terms serendipity, Grace, and peace. First, let's accentuate the positive: the word selected most often as favorite is. A look at some of the favorite and least favorite words selected by Visual Thesaurus and subscribers offers some insight on verbal attractions and aversions.Īs I explained in an article in yesterday's Albany Times Union, we can learn a lot from the words that our subscribers select as 'favorite' and 'least favorite' in their user profiles. But other times a word is disliked because it just sounds, well, icky. What inspires such deep feelings, and why does word hate often seem to run hotter than word love? In the case of words like impactful, discussed in yesterday's Red Pen Diaries, the bad vibes may arise because of an association with vacuous management-speak or other institutional jargon. Sometimes our perspective on language isn't exactly rational: we love some words and absolutely despise other ones.

Hate word vs word hate