What is your favourite word?

Over the weekend, I was sitting at the table with my 6 year old daughter eating breakfast, when out of the blue she asked me –

Mum? Do you know what my favourite word is?

My ears perked up.

Favourite word? Hmmm, that’s a good question. Of course I wasn’t aware of her having a favourite word so I responded with, ‘No, what is your favourite word?’

Her response was simply, ‘Had.’

Now I could make up some elaborate explanation as to why had was my daughters’ favourite word, but I think her reasoning is the best by far.

‘My favourite word is had because it has all of the initials of my name – AHD.’

Nevertheless I thought it was a very thought provoking question. Because any parent would realise, that once your child has explained their case it is now over to you to answer the question for yourself.

My favourite word… just one? Well I remembered when I was quite young I fell in love with one word – for almost the exact same reasons.

Level.

Firstly, because at the time I was watching Sesame Street (yes, you read that correctly) and they were talking about palindromes. A palindrome is a word, phrase, number, or other sequence of characters which reads the same backward or forward.

(Yet another of my favourite words because of the way it rolls off your tongue. Though why the word palindrome isn’t a palindrome in itself is a question for another day…)

And an example the Sesame Street team gave was the word level. Instantly, this stuck in my mind. The similarities the word level has to my own name struck me. And I fell in love.

For those of you who know me by my full name will know what I am talking about… minus the ‘yn’ at the end of course. Ok, for those of you that don’t –

Llewell (yn) = level

So what is your favourite word, and why?

Feel free to leave your comment below. I just may feature it in an article to come…