Flavour Is Mostly Smell
Flavor is the taste of food. Most of what people call taste is actually detected by the nose, not the tongue.
Flavor, spelled *flavour* in Britain, is the overall sensory impression of food. It is largely olfactory: the tongue detects only five basic tastes, while the nose distinguishes thousands of aroma compounds. That is why food seems tasteless with a blocked nose, and why holding your nose while eating something unpleasant genuinely helps.
- The taste of food. *A strong flavor.*
- A distinctive quality. *A local flavor.*
- To season. *Flavored with lemon.*
- Flavour of the month — currently fashionable. *The flavour of the month.*
Word forms
| Form | Word | Example |
|---|---|---|
| American | flavor | A rich flavor. |
| British | flavour | A subtle flavour. |
| Verb | flavour | Flavour the sauce. |
| Adjective | flavoursome | A flavoursome stew. |
| Related | aroma | A fine aroma. |
How it is used in a sentence
- Flavour is mostly smell.Retronasal olfaction.
- He is the flavour of the month.Currently favoured.
- Quarks come in six flavours.Physics borrowed the word.
The five basic tastes
- Sweet — sugars and some proteins
- Sour — acids
- Salty — sodium and some other ions
- Bitter — many alkaloids, a warning signal
- Umami — savouriness, from glutamates, recognised in 1908
From Old French *flaour*, a smell, possibly from Latin *fragrare*, to smell sweet. The spelling with U is British, without it American.
Is taste the same as flavour?
No. Taste is what the tongue detects. Flavour combines taste with aroma, texture and temperature.
What is umami?
The savoury taste produced by glutamates, identified by Kikunae Ikeda in 1908 and now accepted as a fifth basic taste.