Bittersweet

How to spell bittersweet

11 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce bittersweet

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does bittersweet mean?

1. adjectiveBringing a mixture of happiness and sadness at the same time.
2. adjectiveHaving a flavour that is both bitter and sweet, as in dark chocolate or marmalade.

Bittersweet in a sentence

• Her last day at the office was a bittersweet occasion full of fond goodbyes.

• The recipe calls for a bittersweet dark chocolate with a high cocoa content.

• Selling the family home felt bittersweet after so many years of memories.

• She preferred the bittersweet tang of orange marmalade to ordinary jam.

Where does bittersweet come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Bittersweet is a native English compound, joining two of the oldest taste words in the language. Bitter comes from Old English biter, which described a sharp, biting flavour and was related to the verb bitan, meaning 'to bite', while sweet comes from Old English swete, the pleasant taste of honey or ripe fruit. The two were already being yoked together by the late medieval period, and Chaucer used the form 'bitter-swete' around the fourteenth century to describe love that brings pain and pleasure at once. From a literal mixture of tastes the word broadened into its now-dominant figurative sense: an experience that is happy and sad in the same breath. Because both halves are everyday words spelled exactly as they sound, the only real trap is remembering that it is written solid, with no hyphen and no double letter where the two parts meet.

How the word is built

• bitter (Old English biter: sharp, harsh-tasting)
• sweet (Old English swete: pleasant-tasting), a transparent compound adjective