Tasty

How to spell tasty

5 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce tasty

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does tasty mean?

1. adjectiveHaving a pleasant, appetising flavour.

Tasty in a sentence

• The soup was warm and surprisingly tasty for a quick weeknight meal.

• A tasty marinade can transform an ordinary cut of chicken.

Where does tasty come from?

Language of origin: French

The word grows out of the Old French verb 'taster', meaning 'to touch, feel, or sample', which itself descends from a Vulgar Latin form 'taxitare', a frequentative of the Latin 'taxare', 'to handle or assess'. English took the noun and verb 'taste' in the 1300s, and the sense narrowed over time from a general 'trying' to the specific act of perceiving flavour with the tongue. The adjective 'tasty' was formed on home soil by adding the native English suffix '-y', 'full of or characterised by', and it appears from the early 1600s meaning 'pleasing to the palate'. The spelling trap is small but real: because the base word ends in a silent 'e', writers must remember to drop that 'e' when adding '-y', giving 'tasty' rather than the mistaken 'tastey'. A useful relative sharing the same root is 'tax', which preserves the older idea of handling and assessing.

How the word is built

• taste (flavour)
• -y (adjective suffix); the silent 'e' of 'taste' is dropped before -y