What's the best word ever?

Blogger Ted McCagg has been hosting a "Best Word Ever contest." That there seemed to be no rules, no criteria and apparently no "contest" except for Mr McCagg's own choice is no matter.

Brackets of competing words like like whirligig and scalawag and zydeco and angina have faced off in a gradually narrowing contest over the course of months. The entrants seemed to be chosen for the sheer fun of saying them.

Now we have the winner ... dipthong.

Darn. I kinda like kerfuffle myself.

As we all know, a diphthong, literally "two sounds" or "two tones", also known as a gliding vowel, refers to two adjacent vowel sounds occurring within the same syllable. Technically, a diphthong is a vowel with two different targets: that is, the tongue moves during the pronunciation of the vowel. In most dialects of English, the words eye, hay, boy, low, and cow contain diphthongs.

A sure winner.

Check out the runners up here.