Art & MusicGreek → English
Euphony
/ˈjuːfəni/noun
Pleasantness in the sound of words or music.
The Greek roots
εὖ
eû
well, good
φωνή
phōnḗ
voice, sound
Literally: “good sound”
The story of the word
εὐφωνία was a working criterion in Greek criticism, not a decorative compliment: rhetorical handbooks warned against consonants that collide across a word boundary, centuries before anyone had a phonetics. English took it in the 1620s. Cacophony arrived at almost the same moment, which suggests the pair came in together as a critic's tool rather than separately as two borrowings.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Late Latin → French → English
- First recorded
- 1620s
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
euphemismeulogyeuthanasiacacophony
In a sentence
He chose the name for euphony alone; it means nothing in either language.