Phonaesthetics

Phonaesthetics remains a budding and often subjective field of study, with no scientifically or otherwise formally established definition; today, it mostly exists as a marginal branch of psychology, phonetics, or poetics.

The English compound noun cellar door has been widely cited as an example of a word or phrase that is beautiful purely in terms of its sound (i.e., euphony) without inherent regard for its meaning.

It has been promoted as beautiful-sounding by various writers; linguist Geoffrey Nunberg specifically names the writers H. L. Mencken in 1920; David Allan Robertson in 1921; Dorothy Parker, Hendrik Willem van Loon, and Albert Payson Terhune in the 1930s; George Jean Nathan in 1935; J. R. R. Tolkien in a lecture, "English and Welsh", delivered in 1955 (in which he described his reverence for the Welsh language and about which he said "cellar doors [i.e. beautiful words] are extraordinarily frequent"; see also Sound and language in Middle-earth); and C. S. Lewis in 1963.

by Norman Mailer, the 1967 play It's Called the Sugar Plum by Israel Horovitz,[15] a 1991 essay by Jacques Barzun,[16] the 2001 psychological drama film Donnie Darko,[17][18] and a scene in the 2019 movie Tolkien.

[23] Tolkien, Lewis, and others have suggested that cellar door's auditory beauty becomes more apparent the more the word is dissociated from its literal meaning, for example, by using alternative spellings such as Selador, Selladore, Celador, Selidor (an island name in Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea), or Salidar (Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time series,) which take on the quality of an enchanting name (and some of which suggest a specifically standard British pronunciation of the word: /sɛlədɔː/),[13][c][d][26] which is homophonous with "sell a daw."