Psithurism (n.) the sound the wind makes as it whispers through the leaves.
Psithurism is an objectively beautiful word.
If you’ve ever said it out loud, you’ve probably noticed that the sound made when saying it is similar to the sound leaves make when the wind whispers through them.
In other words, psithurism is an onomatopoeic (try saying that seven times fast), which is a word that suggests or sounds like the thing it represents (sizzle and buzz are other examples).
Psithurism is derived from the Greek word psithuros, which is an adjective which literally means (1) whispering or (2) slanderous. (It might seem odd that a word like this would have such definitional range, but we’ll get to that shortly.)
The first meaning is used three hundred years before the birth of Christ, in the opening line of a pastoral poem by the Greek author Theocritus, which begins: “sweet is the psithurism and the pine.” The word is used in its noun form (psithurisma) to describe the whispering sound the wind makes as it breathes through the swaying Sicilian pines growing by a mountain brook.
Victorian authors in the 19th century came to appreciate this use of the word, which has a positive connotation.
St. Paul, on the other hand, preferred the negative.In the first chapter of his epistle to the Romans, he uses the word psithuristes to refer to “gossips” or “whisperers” as he lists sins God gives the ungodly over to:
28 And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God handed them over to their undiscerning mind to do what is improper.29 They are filled with every form of wickedness, evil, greed, and malice; full of envy, murder, rivalry, treachery, and spite. They are gossips30 and scandalmongers and they hate God. They are insolent, haughty, boastful, ingenious in their wickedness, and rebellious toward their parents.
31 They are senseless, faithless, heartless, ruthless.
32 Although they know the just decree of God that all who practice such things deserve death, they not only do them but give approval to those who practice them.
— Romans 1:28–32, New American Bible (Revised Edition)
Psithuristes or gossips in verse 28 refers to people who secretly slander or whisper about others, as opposed to openly slandering them.
To close out, let’s fast forward to the last notable literary occurrence of psithurism, which was in the 19th century, when a few Victorian authors noticed the word’s usage in ancient Greek poetry, liked the way it sounded, and appropriated it for their own use.
For example, in 1873, the English author Mortimer Collins wrote a massive three-volume, quarter-of-a-million-word novel called Transmigration, the middle volume of which features a utopian Mars. He wrote sentences like this one: “a psithurism seemed to pass through her, as when a full-foliaged tree is caught by the wooing south wind[.]”
Fortunately, our friend Mortimer is credited for introducing the word psithurism into the English language. Unfortunately, Mortimer’s Martian novel had metaphorical rotten tomatoes thrown at it by the literati of his time.
They apparently found his prose and overuse of Greek linguistic appropriations to be a bit pretentious (overly posh was probably the phrase they used), but I prefer to think that they just didn’t like the title.