This Figure shows the estimated Lexical Aesthetic Potential (LAP) for 20 words (10 ‚most beautiful‘ & 10 ‚most ugly‘) from the original French version of Baudelaire’s ‚Les Fleurs du Mal‘ compared to the English version (‚The flowers of evil‘)
The LAP estimates are based on an algorithm which learns to predict word beauty from a number of features, such as valence, semantic associations, sonority score, familarity or word length (cf. Jacobs, 2017). It can be used to predict liking ratings for all kinds of verbal materials including excerpts of novels, poem stanzas, proverbs or just names (of persons, pets or brands).
Jacobs AM (2017) Quantifying the Beauty of Words: A Neurocognitive Poetics Perspective. Front. Hum. Neurosci. 11:622. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2017.00622 https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2017.00622