A Māori word for the duty to care for the natural world has been named the most beautiful word on the planet. The language-learning company Babbel gave the honour to kaitiakitanga, a term that describes guardianship and the responsibility to protect the land, water and living things for the people who come after us.
Kaitiakitanga came out on top of a list of 223 words drawn from 75 languages. Babbel says it built the long list by reading through thousands of conversations in online language communities, including threads on Reddit and TikTok where people share the words they love and the ones that cannot be neatly translated. An international jury of linguists, writers and cultural experts then worked through the shortlist and picked a winner.
The judges scored each word on four things. They looked at how it sounds, what it means, how rare it is, and how much it speaks to the world we live in now. On all four counts kaitiakitanga stood out. Babbel said the word “brings together everything that makes a word extraordinary: a distinctive sound, a profound meaning, and a concept that has no direct equivalent in many other languages”, according to RNZ.
For anyone who has spent time around te reo Māori, the choice will feel familiar. Kaitiakitanga sits at the heart of how many iwi and hapū think about their relationship with rivers, forests, harbours and the coast. A kaitiaki is a guardian, and kaitiakitanga is the act of guardianship carried out on behalf of both the living and those not yet born. It is not simply about looking after a patch of land. It is about keeping the balance between people and the natural world, and passing that balance on in good health.
Babbel language expert Esteban Touma Portilla said the word carries a message the whole planet needs to hear. He said kaitiakitanga “reminds us of our responsibility to care for the environment and for one another” at a time when the effects of climate change are being felt more sharply. That idea of caring for one another as well as for the environment is part of why the term resonated so widely with the judges.
Babbel linguist Maren Pauli said the winner showed what happens when several qualities line up at once. She said words become “truly extraordinary where sound, meaning, cultural context, and timeliness come together”. In other words, a beautiful word is not only pleasant to say. It also opens a door onto a way of seeing the world, and it lands at a moment when people are ready to hear it.
Kaitiakitanga beat a strong field. The shortlist read like a tour of the world’s languages and the ideas each one holds onto. It included saudade, the Portuguese word for a deep and bittersweet longing, and hiraeth, the Welsh term for a homesickness for a place you may never return to. Japan was there twice, with ikigai, a reason for getting up in the morning, and kintsugi, the art of mending broken pottery with gold so the cracks become part of the beauty. Ubuntu, the Zulu idea that a person is a person through other people, also made the list, along with the Spanish ojalá, the Turkish yakamoz for the reflection of the moon on water, and the Finnish poronkusema, an old country measure of distance based on how far a reindeer walks between rest stops.
What links many of those words is that they name something English struggles to say in one go. Babbel has made that point before. It says some of the most beautiful words are the ones that capture an idea with no tidy equivalent anywhere else, and that words from small or endangered languages often open up a view of the world the bigger languages miss. Te reo Māori, still working its way back from decades of decline, fits that description. A single word doing the work of a whole sentence in English is exactly the kind of thing the judges were looking for.
The result landed well at home. Coverage in New Zealand, including in the New Zealand Herald, framed the honour as a moment of quiet pride, and a reminder that te reo Māori carries knowledge that cannot always be swapped straight into English. The recognition was less about one word winning a contest and more about a worldview being seen and valued on a global stage.
It is worth being clear about what the award is and is not. This is a promotion by a company that sells language courses, and the judging mixes online chatter with expert opinion rather than any hard science of beauty. There is no true way to measure whether one word is more beautiful than another, and Babbel does not claim there is. What the exercise does do is put a spotlight on words that make people stop and think, and this year that spotlight has fallen on a term New Zealanders use to describe one of their deepest values.
The timing gives the choice extra weight. Kaitiakitanga is not a museum piece. It turns up in the way councils talk about freshwater, in the work of volunteer groups replanting dunes and clearing pests, and in the debates over who should look after the coast and the catchments. A word that started as a way of describing a duty to the land now travels the world as a shorthand for an idea plenty of people are reaching for. For a small country at the bottom of the Pacific, having that word named the most beautiful on Earth is a fine thing to wake up to.
What do you make of the choice? Is kaitiakitanga the word you would have picked, or is there another that means more to you? Tell us in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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