sweet

UK/swiːt/US/swit/

adjectiveA14 meanings One of the most common words in English · #313 of 15,258leans spoken

Other forms: sweets, sweeter, sweetest

Sweet is the taste of sugar. Honey on a spoon, a ripe strawberry, the icing on a birthday cake, the first mouthful of a cold fizzy drink.

It stretches a long way past the tongue. A sweet smell comes off cut grass and off a bakery in the morning; a sweet voice is soft and easy to listen to; a sweet old man is kind, and a sweet little dog is one you want to pick up. That's sweet of you thanks someone for a small kindness. In Britain a sweet is also a thing you eat — a boiled sweet out of a paper bag, and sweets is what children ask for where Americans say candy — and the sweet is the pudding at the end of a meal. One warning about the compliment: calling a grown man sweet says something warm about his nature and nothing at all about his looks.

Definitions of sweet

1adjectivetasteTasting of sugar.A1~84%
“The tea was far too sweet to finish.”
- Said"This is far too sweet for me; you can have the rest."
- WrittenThe peaches were sweet and warm from the tree, and juice ran down her wrist.
- UsedChoose the sweeter variety for jam and the sharper one for pies.
- ContrastSweet, not sugar. Sugar is the thing in the bowl; sweet is the taste it gives. sugar →
- Not thisA kind person is sweet in another sense. Here only food and drink can be.
- Exchange"Is the melon sweet?""Very. Try a slice before I finish it."
Patternsweet + noun (tooth, tea, wine) · taste sweet · too sweet · sweeter than · sweetness
synonyms: sugary
2adjectivegentleKind, gentle, or charming.A2~2%
“It was sweet of you to wait in the rain.”
3adjectivepleasantPleasant to smell or to hear.A2~12%
“A sweet smell came out of the bakery door.”
4nounsmellIn British English, a small piece of sugary food; also the pudding at the end of a meal.B1~2%
“He bought a bag of sweets at the station.”

Shares are an estimate: a language model read 9 sentences found in the wild and placed 8 of them on a sense (1 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.

Remember it

swEEt → two sugar cubes in the tea

Look at the two e's in the middle: two sugar cubes dropped into your tea, and now it is sweet.

hooks ontosugar

Phrases it lives in

have a sweet tooth — be the sort of person who always wants the pudding
short and sweet — brief, and no longer than it needs to be
the sweet spot — the exact point at which something works best
sweet dreams — said to someone going to bed

Also practised as

nounA pleasant scent like flowers or sugar.

Where it comes from

One of the oldest words in the language, and it has barely shifted: the ancestor swéh₂dus already meant sweet, Old English swēte meant sweet, and here it still is. The same root reached English a second time by the long road through Latin, where suāvis meant delicious and pleasant, and came out the other end as suave. A suave man and a sweet one are the same word, one of them dressed for dinner.

Proto-Indo-European
*sweh₂d-
Middle English
swete
English, today
sweet

Built from

swœ̄te · Old English — sweet
*sweh₂d- · Proto-Indo-European — sweet

From Middle English swete. From Middle English soot, sweete, swete, swoote, from Old English swēte, swoete, swōt, swœ̄te (“sweet”), from Proto-West Germanic swōtī, from Proto-Germanic swōtuz (“sweet”), from Proto-Indo-European swéh₂dus (“sweet”), from sweh₂d- (“sweet”) + -us. 2

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in In the Kitchen, Texture & Touch

Practise this word

sweet in the wild

By the 20th century, though, sweet entremets had come to be included among the desserts.
Dessert
Cultivars of the sweet potato have been bred to bear tubers with flesh and skin of various colors.
Sweet potato
The sweet potato and the potato are only distantly related, both being in the order Solanales.
Sweet potato
A pie is a baked dish which is usually made of a pastry dough casing that contains a filling of various sweet or savoury ingredients.
Pie
In addition to sugars like sucrose, many other chemical compounds are sweet, including aldehydes, ketones, and sugar alcohols.
Sweetness

1 / 2

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

the swœ̄te family

sweet sweetie

sweet — used about once every 23 pages · #313 · point at the bar for the others

Definitions of sweet

1adjectivetasteTasting of sugar.A1~84%

“The tea was far too sweet to finish.”

Said"This is far too sweet for me; you can have the rest."
WrittenThe peaches were sweet and warm from the tree, and juice ran down her wrist.
UsedChoose the sweeter variety for jam and the sharper one for pies.
ContrastSweet, not sugar. Sugar is the thing in the bowl; sweet is the taste it gives. sugar →
Not thisA kind person is sweet in another sense. Here only food and drink can be.
Exchange"Is the melon sweet?""Very. Try a slice before I finish it."

Patternsweet + noun (tooth, tea, wine) · taste sweet · too sweet · sweeter than · sweetness

synonyms: sugary

2adjectivegentleKind, gentle, or charming.A2~2%

“It was sweet of you to wait in the rain.”

3adjectivepleasantPleasant to smell or to hear.A2~12%

“A sweet smell came out of the bakery door.”

4nounsmellIn British English, a small piece of sugary food; also the pudding at the end of a meal.B1~2%

“He bought a bag of sweets at the station.”

Shares are an estimate: a language model read 9 sentences found in the wild and placed 8 of them on a sense (1 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.