Pretty Words

I don't advocate using thesaurus words to make yourself sound more literary.  But sometimes pretty words can give just the right feeling to a piece of work.  And I've learned from StumbleUpon that people like to post lists of pretty words on the web.  Here's one such post:

Prettiest Words: A Work in Progress

The first one gave me pause; the person who constructed the list might like the way it sounds, but "abattoir" is not a pretty concept.

Here are a few other similar lists (fair warning, some of them appear to be copied content from other sites):

• The 100 Most Beautiful Words in English (I've seen the same list in several places, don't know the originator)
• 100 Beautiful and Ugly Words (this one seems to offer something of a value judgment in which words are on which list)
• Survey Identifies Most Pretty and Ugly Words in English Language (argh, it's "prettiest" and "ugliest")