Minnesota Public Radio host Cathy Wurzer said that she gets "a little smile every time I get to say on the air."

Inver Grove Heights resident Molly Jo Miller said she used to repeat the word over and over in her head while throwing hay bales to her dad during chores on the family farm.

Kathryn Litherland, a professional translator, said, "There's something about the word that just feels like a tire rolling down a hill. You have to give it a little kick to get it started, but it picks up speed near terminal velocity by the time you get to the end."

Those are just a few of the scores of suggestions that flooded in from readers when we put out a call on social media for words that are fun to say.

We found that lots of you take pleasure in saying distinctive place names like , , and . Claudia Welty of Duluth said her infant grandson used to giggle whenever he heard the word .

"That was 14 years ago, and that word still brings a smile to all of our faces," she said.

Local food writer James Norton nominated . "Oh-CON-oh-mo-wok, try it, it's super fun!" he wrote on Twitter. "I can't stop saying it now!" someone else wrote in reply.

Lots of food words are as fun to say as they are to eat, according to readers: , , , , schnitzel, smorgasbord, , , , goulash.

There are people out there who also like to say , dirigible, ramekin, , , hubbub, hullabaloo, hootenanny, plethora, and .

But why do people go out of their way to say , , , , and galoshes? What tickles us when we say , kibosh, , , bituminous, blather, bamboozled, ballyhoo?

To find out, we consulted experts in language and psychology — academics who think deep thoughts and conduct experiments about why some words are funny, why some are considered beautiful and why others sound ugly.

Our investigation led us to studies that examined why many people dislike the word "moist," evidence that k-words are funny, and the strange case for "cellar door" as the most beautiful phrase in the English language.

The sound and the beauty

First, words that are fun to say aren't the same as beautiful words.

People who study phonoaesthetics, like British linguist David Crystal, have noted that words that are considered pleasant-sounding usually also have pleasant meanings.

Consider these examples of sweet-sounding words with sweet meanings from a list of most beautiful English words chosen in 1932 by lexicographer Wilfred Funk, president of the Funk & Wagnalls dictionary and encyclopedia company: dawn, hush, lullaby, murmuring, tranquil, mist, luminous, chimes, golden, melody. (We could find no reports on whether Wilfred Funk found his own name particularly .)

One weird exception to this rule is a piece of linguistic folklore promoted by writers from H.L. Mencken to C.S. Lewis to J.R.R. Tolkien, who held that "cellar door" is the most beautiful phrase in English. Their argument is that if you detach the phrase from the homely image of an entry to the basement and focus on how it sounds, you'll find yourself whispering it like a lover's name: sel-la-dore.

Connection to meaning

But it's hard for many of us to separate a word's meaning from our aesthetic judgment of it. That's why Dorothy Parker supposedly argued that "check enclosed" is the most attractive phrase in the English language.

Likewise, it's the association that "moist" has in some people's minds with bodily functions that causes up to 20% of the population to dislike hearing that word, according to one study done by psychologists at Oberlin College and Trinity University.

As English essayist Max Beerbohm once opined, "If gondola were a disease, and if a scrofula were a beautiful boat peculiar to a beautiful city, the effect of each word would be exactly the reverse of what it is."

Yet many of the words suggested by our readers as fun to say are not particularly pretty-sounding or pretty-meaning: goiter, colonoscopy, plankton, .

A doctor who responded told us she finds Malassezia furfur fun to say though it's not very fun for a patient. It's a skin fungus.

One favorite word suggested by a reader — cacophony — actually has been included on lists of the ugliest-sounding words in the language. It may be fun to say, but its meaning is literally something that sounds bad.

Fun doesn't equal funny

Are fun-to-say words simply funny? That's not exactly it, either.

When researchers at the University of Alberta studied 200 words rated as the funniest out of about 5,000 English words presented to crowd-sourced judges, they found that the words people find funny tended to fall into six categories: sex, insults, body function, animals, profanity and partying.

By doing a statistical analysis of the funny words, the Canadian researchers found that the "k" sound occurred frequently, confirming the wisdom of the vaudeville comic depicted in the Neil Simon play and movie "The Sunshine Boys": "Words with 'k' in them are funny ... Alka Seltzer is funny. Chicken is funny. Pickle is funny."

Funny words also were likely to have the letter "y" or have an "oo" sound. They were likely to be relatively short, according to the study. So words like boob, poop, baboon, puke, skunk, cluck, yack, yuks — and lots of others we can't print here.

But fun-to-say words sent to us via social media weren't these sorts of earthy, punchy descriptions of bodily functions or body parts. Instead, the words our readers suggested were multisyllabic, mellifluous mouthfuls: , Mahtomedi, molybdenum.

G, B and oo

"I really think you're onto something entirely different," said Chris Westbury, when we told him about our collection of fun-to-say words. Westbury is a psychology professor with an interest in language who co-authored the University of Alberta funny word study.

When Westbury analyzed a list of about 80 fun-to-say words that we gave him, he found that they tend to feature repetition seen in jibber-jabber, dilly-dally and roly-poly.

"The more repetition, the more fun," he said. He also found that "oo" "increases the odds that a word is amusing."

Fun-to-say words also have a higher-than-average likelihood of having "g" and "b" sounds, which Westbury said are among the strongest consonants, requiring a rapid expulsion of air to pronounce.

"So it seems like maybe one thing that makes a word fun to say is that the word uses powerful sounds," Westbury said.

No wonder that people told us they like to say and bugaboo.

Based on his analysis, he predicted that people should also enjoy saying and .

"I might even follow up on this with a real study sometime," Westbury added.

We could go on, but we don't want to be loquacious.

Did we miss a word you find fun to say? Add it in the comments.