Cellar door

In phonaesthetics, the English compound noun cellar door has been cited as an example of a word or phrase which is beautiful purely in terms of its sound (euphony), without regard for semantics (i.e., meaning). It has been variously presented either as merely one beautiful instance of many, or as the most beautiful in the English language; as the author's personal choice, that of an eminent scholar's, or of a foreigner who does not speak the language. The original instance of this observation has not been discovered, although it was made as early as 1903.

The semantics of cellar door derive straightforwardly from its component terms: in the United States, a cellar door is often a door or pair of shutter doors between the outside of a building and its cellar. In Britain, Ireland and Canada, a cellar door is often located within a house and opens onto a flight of stairs leading to the cellar. Outside doors are more common to pubs and restaurants.

From the nineteenth century, many American houses on large plots had slanted trapdoors abutting the side and opening onto a flight of steps leading down into the cellar. By the mid-twentieth century this rustic feature was a rarity; in 1953, William Chapman White wrote in the New York Herald Tribune:

The modern small home or apartment has ... deprived today's child of ... the pleasant summer afternoon activity of sliding down cellar doors. Just what happened to the slanted cellar door in this efficient age isn't clear; although cellars have remained, nothing has disappeared more quietly from modern life than these cellar doors.

Geoff Nunberg suggests the use of such a semantically banal term to illustrate the idea of beauty appeals to aesthetes as "an occasion to display a capacity to discern beauty in the names of prosaic things".

Nunberg suggests the phonetic characteristics of cellar door are relevant, not for purely auditory reasons, but by phonological association with languages imbued with romantic preconceptions:

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