What’s the Nicest Word in Spanish?

Have you ever heard the word “Querétaro”? Could you use it in a sentence? If not, do you at least fancy its slightly alliterated sound? You might not be aware of it, but for thousands of people, the answer is a unanimous “yes”. Just a clue: it is linked to salamanders… and to a republic.

The Instituto Cervantes celebrates every June El Día E (The E Day), with the aim of promoting the Spanish language and culture all around the world. To that purpose, a number of different activities are held in countries where Spanish is as a mother tongue or it is studied as a foreign language. As part of this celebration, in 2011, Spanish speakers were encouraged to pick their preferred word in this language. Choosing just one word out of a whole language as your favourite can be challenging, to say the least. But it can become even trickier if we take into account that according to the report ‘El español: una lengua viva’ by the Instituto Cervantes, Spanish is the mother tongue of around 470 million people in the world (6.7%), ranking second after Mandarin. And its growing trend is not likely to slow down: it is estimated than in three or four generations, the percentage of Spanish-speaking population will reach 10%. To try to delimit the contest, several leading figures of the Spanish-speaking world were asked to submit their favourite words, which made up the final list of candidate terms. Some of these personalities were Isabel Allende (who suggested espíritu, “spirit”), Antonio Banderas (alegría, “joy”), Pau Gasol (belleza, “beauty”) or Shakira (meliflua, “honeyed”). Thousands of people participated in the contest by voting online. The winning words are as follows:

And here it is: Querétaro was chosen as the best word in Spanish. However, it was not like that during all the competition. When gracias and sueño were leading the race, this word seemed to appear out of nothing and went right away to the first position. So for those of you who are still wondering about it, Querétaro is the name of one of the 31 states of Mexico, and it is said to mean “the isle of blue salamanders”. However, it is not known whether the queretanos had something to do with the sudden boost of the word…

Even though this contest also took place in 2010, it was much trickier back then. There was no term list to choose the words from, so the users were able to submit them themselves. Rumours abounded that the former king of Spain would read out loud the wining word during the celebration of the Día E, as well as the definition that accompanied it. Nevertheless, some days before the deadline, something happened: according to official sources, the IT system “collapsed”, and the final list could not be submitted; just when the word that was leading the race was… república (republic).

The words Querétaro, gracias or república are just an insignificant portion of the second biggest language in the world. However, the dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy (in Spanish, Real Academia Española, the institution responsible for overseeing the Spanish language) contains approximately 88,000 entries, and it is estimated that the actual number of existing words amounts to more than 106,000. Out of such a rich and wide variety… would you be able to choose just one as your favourite?

P.S.: Out of curiosity, you might like to know that recent research was conducted by the University of Vermont in order to try to find out which language had a biggest amount of words with a positive bias; in other words, which language is the happiest (you can check out the study here). With more than 100,000 words, a growing number of speakers which already surpasses four hundred million, and words like tú, libertad or sueño… does it come as a surprise that the alleged happiest language in the world is Spanish?