sour

UK/ˈsaʊ.ə/US/ˈsaʊ.ɚ/

adjectiveA2+4 meanings Common in everyday speech and writing · #3,433 of 15,258neutral

Other forms: soured, souring, sours

Sour is the sharp taste that makes your face squeeze up. A slice of lemon, raw rhubarb, the first bite of an apple picked a month too early.

Sour also means gone off, which is a different thing: milk goes sour in a warm kitchen, and sour milk smells wrong rather than sharp. Both of those sit behind the figurative use — a sour mood, a sour look, a sour smell in a stairwell — and when a friendship or a deal turns sour it has gone bad exactly the way the milk did. Sour cream is soured on purpose and is a fine thing on a baked potato. The important warning is that sour is not bitter: lemon and vinegar are sour, while black coffee and dark chocolate are bitter, and English keeps the two tastes firmly apart.

Definitions of sour

1adjectivesourHaving a sharp acid taste, like lemon or unripe fruit.A2+~70%
“The apples were still green and far too sour to eat.”
- Said"That's sour! Did you put any sugar in this at all?"
- WrittenThe plums were still sour in late summer, and the birds left them alone too.
- UsedAdd a sour note with lemon juice or vinegar to lift a heavy dish.
- ContrastSour, not sweet. Sweet fills your mouth; sour makes it pucker. sweet →
- Not thisMilk that has soured is another meaning: gone off. Here sour is a taste, sharp and acid.
Patternsour + noun (taste, cherry, cream) · go / turn sour · sweet and sour · sourness
synonyms: tart, sharp, acidic
2adjectivemilkGone bad, in the way milk does.A2~10%
“The milk had gone sour overnight.”
3adjectivesurlyUnfriendly and bad-tempered.B2~10%
“He gave me a sour look and went back to his paper.”
synonyms: surly, sullen
4verbspoilTo spoil something, or to make a relationship go bad.B2~10%
“The row over the money soured things between them for years.”

Shares are an estimate: a language model read 10 sentences found in the wild and placed 10 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.

sour is a taste.

Remember it

sOUR → OUR faces after a lemon

Bite into a lemon and look at our faces: eyes shut, mouth pulled tight. That is sour.

Phrases it lives in

sour grapes — pretending to look down on something you wanted and could not have

Where it comes from

Sour is old and has barely moved: Old English sur, Proto-Germanic suraz, from a Proto-Indo-European word that already meant sour. German still says sauer and Swedish sur. The best cousin is Polish ser, which means cheese — the sour thing milk turns into when you leave it alone.

Middle English
sour
English, today
sour

From Middle English sour. From Middle English sour, from Old English sūr (“sour”), from Proto-West Germanic sūr, from Proto-Germanic sūraz (“sour”), from Proto-Indo-European súHros (“sour”). Cognate with West Frisian soer, Dutch zuur (“sour”), Low German suur, German sauer (“sour”), Danish, Norwegian Bokmål, Norwegian Nynorsk and Swedish sur (“sour”), French sur (“sour”), Faroese súrur (“sour”), Icelandic súr (“sour, bitter”),

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in In the Kitchen, A Man Called Ove, Texture & Touch

First appears in chapter 11 of A Man Called Ove.

Practise this word

sour in the wild

Prunus cerasus (sour cherry, tart cherry, or dwarf cherry) is an Old World species of Prunus in the subgenus Cerasus (cherries).
Prunus cerasus
Sweet and sour sauce has remained popular in Asian and Western cuisines since the Middle Ages.
Sweet and sour
A pisco sour is an alcoholic cocktail of Peruvian origin, which is made from pisco, a Peruvian brandy, with sour citrus juice and sweetener components.
Pisco sour
The Peruvian pisco sour includes Peruvian pisco with freshly squeezed lime juice, simple syrup, ice, egg white, and Angostura bitters.
Pisco sour
Sometimes, an egg white is included, which is sometimes called a Boston sour.
Whiskey sour

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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.

Related words

Definitions of sour

1adjectivesourHaving a sharp acid taste, like lemon or unripe fruit.A2+~70%

“The apples were still green and far too sour to eat.”

Said"That's sour! Did you put any sugar in this at all?"
WrittenThe plums were still sour in late summer, and the birds left them alone too.
UsedAdd a sour note with lemon juice or vinegar to lift a heavy dish.
ContrastSour, not sweet. Sweet fills your mouth; sour makes it pucker. sweet →
Not thisMilk that has soured is another meaning: gone off. Here sour is a taste, sharp and acid.

Patternsour + noun (taste, cherry, cream) · go / turn sour · sweet and sour · sourness

synonyms: tart, sharp, acidic

2adjectivemilkGone bad, in the way milk does.A2~10%

“The milk had gone sour overnight.”

3adjectivesurlyUnfriendly and bad-tempered.B2~10%

“He gave me a sour look and went back to his paper.”

synonyms: surly, sullen

4verbspoilTo spoil something, or to make a relationship go bad.B2~10%

“The row over the money soured things between them for years.”

Shares are an estimate: a language model read 10 sentences found in the wild and placed 10 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.

sour is a taste.