Other forms: tastes, tasting, tasted
To taste is to try food with your tongue, and also to have a particular flavour. Taste the sauce. It tastes of lemon. That double direction is the same pattern as smell, and it works the same way.
The noun covers the sense, the flavour, and a person's judgement about what is good: a taste for opera, in poor taste, there is no accounting for taste. That last group is the one that matters socially — describing a remark as in bad taste is a real criticism. Note tasty, which means good to eat, and tasteful, which means showing good judgement about style. They are not interchangeable and mixing them up is memorable.
1verbtasteTo try a little food or drink to see what it is like.
“Taste it before you add any more salt.”
2verbparticularTo have a particular flavour.
“It tastes of almonds.”
3nounflavourThe flavour of something.
“There is a strange taste to the water here.”
4nounjudgementA person's judgement about what is good or attractive.
“She has excellent taste in furniture.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
taste is a sense, or a flavour.
Old French taster meant to touch or feel before it meant to taste, from Latin taxare, to handle. The word moved from the fingers to the tongue, which is why a taste is still, underneath, a way of testing something by contact.
Proto-Indo-European
*teh₂g-
la-cla
taxo — to touch sharply
Vulgar Latin
*tastāre — to touch or feel
Old French
taster — to taste, touch or hit
Middle English
tasten
English, today
taste
Built from
The verb is from Middle English tasten, borrowed from Old French taster (“to taste, touch or hit”), from unattested Vulgar Latin tastāre (“to touch or feel”), from taxitāre, an innovated form of la-cla taxo (“to touch sharply”), from tango (“to touch, to grasp”), ultimately from Proto-Indo-European teh₂g-, which is assumed to have had the same meaning as tangere. The noun came from the verb, and the two conflated after English lost its infinitive suffix -en, though tasten was most likely already used nominatively (as a), similar to Modern English tasting. Almost fully native smack, from smac,smak,smacke, from smæc,smæċċ.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA