freshness

UK/ˈfɹɛʃnəs/US/ˈfɹɛʃnəs/

nounB2+Occasional — familiar, but not everyday · #10,166 of 15,258neutral

Freshness is the quality of being newly made or newly picked. Check the freshness, lose its freshness, freshness date.

In food it is measured by date and judged by smell, and a use-by date is about safety where a best-before is about quality — throwing out food on a best-before date is the commonest domestic waste there is. Of an idea, freshness means originality. Note fresh, which also means cheeky.

Definitions of freshness

1nounfreshnessThe quality of being newly made or newly picked.B2+
“The shop is proud of the freshness of its bread, baked every morning.”

freshness is a quality of newness.

Where it comes from

Middle English
fressh
English
fresh
English, today
freshness

From fresh + -ness. fresh comes from Middle English fressh. From Middle English fressh, from Old English fersċ (“fresh, pure, sweet”), from Proto-West Germanic frisk (“fresh”), from Proto-Germanic friskaz (“fresh”), from Proto-Indo-European preysk- (“fresh”). The verb is from Middle English freshen (“to freshen”), from the adjective. Cognate with Scots fresch (“fresh”), West Frisian farsk (“fresh”), Dutch vers (“fresh”), wa frexh (“fresh”), German frisch (“fresh”), French frais (“fresh”), Danish, Norwegian Bokmål and Norwegian Nynorsk frisk (“fresh”), Swedish frisk (“well, fresh”), Icelandic ferskur (“fresh”), Lithuanian prėskas (“unflavoured, tasteless, fresh”), Russian пре́сный (“sweet, fresh, unleavened, tasteless”). a doublet of fresco and frisk.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in Word Building

Practise this word

freshness in the wild

In some regions, an advisory best before, mandatory use by or freshness date is required on packaged perishable foods.
Shelf life
RTBI therefore involves trade-offs between speed, data freshness, cost, complexity, and the reliability of the information available at the time of analysis.
Real-time business intelligence
Often packaging needs to be resealed in order to maintain product freshness or prevent spillage.
Resealable packaging
If thou doubtest this, see the freshness of youth shining on the faces of thy children.
All about coffee· William H. Ukers

From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

From Project Gutenberg, public domain. These sentences are from real books, shown to illustrate the word at work.

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