Moist. Luggage. Crevice. Stroke. Slacks. Phlegm.

How did those words make you feel?

Certain everyday words drive some people crazy, a phenomenon experts call “word aversion.” But one word appears to rise above all others: “moist.” For that reason, a recent paper in the journal PLOS One used the word as a stand-in to explore why people find some terms repellent.

“It doesn’t really fit into a lot of existing categories for how people think about the psychology of language,” the study’s author, Paul Thibodeau, a professor of psychology at Oberlin College, said of moist. “It’s not a taboo word, it’s not profanity, but it elicits this very visceral disgust reaction.”

A little less than a quarter of the approximately 2,500 unique subjects tested in Mr. Thibodeau’s five experiments over four years had trouble dealing with any appearance of the word.

When asked to react to moist in a free-association task, about one-third of those people responded with “an expression of disgust,” Mr. Thibodeau said. Almost two-thirds of those who later reported an aversion were so bothered by “moist” that they could recall its inclusion among a set of 63 other words — an unusually high rate.