Taste

How to spell taste

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce taste

What does taste mean?

1. verbTo perceive or sample the flavour of food or drink in the mouth.
2. nounThe sensation of flavour, or the quality of a food or drink as perceived by the tongue.
3. nounA person's ability to judge what is of good quality or appropriate, especially in style or art.

Taste in a sentence

• verb

  The chef asked the diners to taste the new soup before it went on the menu.

• noun

  The coffee left a bitter taste on her tongue.

• noun

  Her elegant flat showed real taste in furniture and colour.

• verb

  You could taste the salt in every bite of the bread.

• noun

  A single taste of the curry told him it was far too spicy.

• noun

  The joke was in poor taste and offended several guests.

Where does taste come from?

Language of origin: French

This word travelled into English through Old French taster, which meant 'to touch, to feel, or to try by sampling'. That French verb came from a Vulgar Latin form taxitare, a frequentative built on the Latin taxare, meaning 'to touch sharply or to handle', which in turn was rooted in tangere, 'to touch'. Because of this origin, the earliest English uses around the year 1300 carried the broader idea of testing or examining something by touch, and only gradually narrowed to the modern sense of perceiving flavour with the tongue. The same tangere root underlies a family of familiar relatives such as 'tangible', 'contact', and 'tactile', all of which keep the notion of touching. The spelling stayed simple and regular, ending in a silent -e that lengthens the vowel, which is why the word causes very few problems for adult writers.

How the word is built

• tast- (from Old French taster: to touch, try, sample)
• -e