Term of Art: Euphony

“euphony: Literally the property of ‘sounding well.’ But used at one time of principle equivalent to that of ‘ease or articulation’: thus it was for reasons of ‘euphony’ that one consonant undergoes assimilation to another, or that successive syllables are matched in vowel harmony.”

Excerpted from: Matthews, P.H., ed. The Oxford Concise Dictionary of Linguistics. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.