Tasting

How to spell tasting

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce tasting

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does tasting mean?

1. nounAn organised occasion for sampling small amounts of food or drink to judge their quality.
2. verbPresent participle of taste: sampling or perceiving the flavour of something.

Tasting in a sentence

• noun

  The vineyard hosts a wine tasting every weekend in summer.

• verb

  She kept tasting the soup until the seasoning was right.

• noun

  Tickets for the cheese tasting sold out within an hour.

• verb

  The chef was tasting each sauce before plating the meal.

Where does tasting come from?

Language of origin: French

This word grows from the verb 'taste', which English took from the Old French 'taster', meaning to feel, to touch, or to sample by touching. That French verb is thought to descend from a Vulgar Latin form 'taxitare', a frequentative of the Latin 'taxare', meaning to handle, assess, or appraise sharply, which itself was linked to 'tangere', meaning to touch. The earliest English uses in the 1300s leaned on this touching and testing sense before the meaning narrowed to the experience of flavour on the tongue. Adding the suffix '-ing' produces both the ongoing action and the modern noun for an organised sampling event, as in a wine or cheese tasting. The link back to 'tangere' (to touch) also lives on in relatives such as 'tangible' and 'contact', a reminder that to taste was originally simply to test something by feel.

How the word is built

• taste (from Old French taster: to sample, feel)
• -ing (forms a noun or present participle)