Is This Really the Most Beautiful Sound in the English Language?
Cellar door. Sell a door. Selidor? A deep dive.
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The enduring myth of “Cellar Door” takes a few different forms, but each share the same basic structure: A Japanese visitor or an Italian expat or some unnamed philologists or J.R.R. Tolkien himself are heard to remark that if you’re able to divorce them from their literal meaning (because you are Japanese or Italian or a philologist like J.R.R. Tolkien), the combination of sounds that make up the phrase “Cellar Door” is the most mellifluous and beautiful formulation in the entire English language. Most people are familiar with it from this scene in Donnie Darko.
To the extent that this story is true — which it kind of is, in the sense that some linguistics types and specifically J.R.R. Tolkien have definitely made this claim — you’re at a disadvantage if you have an American accent or one that has a high degree of rhoticity (i.e., you like to really sound out those “r”s). This is because Tolkien is referring to a pronunciation that sounds more like “Seladaw” (as opposed to the American “Sellerdorr”) — and it’s not hard to imagine a Selidor or a Celador fighting alongside Celeborn or Arathorn somewhere deep in The Silmarillion. In fact, here’s Tolkien talking about that very thing (as imagined by the directors of his 2019 biopic).
What Tolkien actually said about “Cellar Door” (at the 1955 O’Donnell Lecture in Oxford, later collected as the essay “English and Welsh”) was this:
“Most English-speaking people, for instance, will admit that cellar door is ‘beautiful’, especially if dissociated from its sense (and from its spelling). More beautiful than, say, sky, and far more beautiful than beautiful. Well then, in Welsh for me cellar doors are extraordinarily frequent, and moving to the higher dimension, the words in which there is pleasure in the contemplation of the association of form and sense are abundant.”
Later, in 1963, C.S. Lewis would make a very similar claim:
“I was astonished when someone first showed that by writing cellar door as Selladore, one produces an enchanting proper name.”
But so what’s going on? Where does this particular phrase come from? And does it really sound that good? The linguist Geoff Nunberg, who’s written at length on the topic, has the best answer to the second question, which is that once you’ve ditched its meaning and its spelling, Cellar Door kind of feels vaguely Welsh, and English speakers have very romantic feelings about certain Welsh-sounding languages, thanks in no small part to folks like Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. He writes:
“But what happens when we strip cellar door down to its pristine phonetic bones, it turns out, is that it at once brings to mind a word from one of those warm-blooded languages English speakers invest with musical beauty, spare in clusters and full of liquids, nasals, and open syllables with cardinal vowel nuclei — the languages of the Mediterranean or Polynesia, or the sentimentalized Celtic that Lewis and Tolkien turned into a staple of fantasy fiction.”
The answer to the first question (“Where does ‘Cellar Door’ come from in the first place?”) is more of a mystery, and it’s one that gets curiouser and curiouser. According to the linguist Grant Barrett, whose deep dive on Cellar Door for The New York Times Magazine is an essential roadmap for any self-respecting cellar-door-ologist, the earliest literary reference to Cellar Door comes from a legitimately weird 1903 novel by the Shakespeare scholar Cyrus Lauron called Gee-Boy. Lauron’s narrator writes of the titular Gee-Boy:
“He even grew to like sounds unassociated with their meaning, and once made a list of the words he loved most, as doubloon, squadron, thatch, fanfare (he never did know the meaning of this one), Sphinx, pimpernel, Caliban, Setebos, Carib, susurro, torquet, Jungfrau. He was laughed at by a friend, but logic was his as well as sentiment; an Italian savant maintained that the most beautiful combination of English sounds was cellar-door; no association of ideas here to help out! sensuous impression merely! the cellar-door is purely American.”
Curiouser still (though this may be the closest we’ll get to an answer about Cellar Door’s origins), “Cellar Door” is featured in a hit 1894 song by Philip Wingate and Henry W. Petrie called “Playmates” (here’s a rather nice cover by Peggy Lee on Spotify if you want to hear it) whose lyrics are:
Say, say, oh playmate,
Come out and play with me
And bring your dollies three,
Climb up my apple tree.
Shout down my rain barrel,
Slide down my cellar door,
And we'll be jolly friends forevermore.
As Geoff Nunberg has noted, the phrase “You can’t slide down my cellar door” enjoyed brief popularity as an idiom related to childishly peevish behavior in the early 1900s as a result of the song’s popularity. Though how it went from there to Tolkien, Lewis, and Ursula LeGuin — who named the Westernmost island in her Earthsea series Selidor — is anybody’s guess. As to whether it actually is the most beautiful-sounding phrase in English, I’ll let Dorothy Parker have the last word: When asked in 1932 about a list of purportedly beautiful English words including “dawn,” “hush,” and “lullaby” that was going around, she named her own favorites as an alternative. They were “cellar door,” “cheque,” and “enclosed.”
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