Tasteful means showing good judgement about what looks right. A tasteful room, tastefully decorated, tasteful restraint.
It is praise for restraint rather than for boldness, which is why it can sound faintly like damning: tasteful usually means nothing here will startle anyone. Its opposite, tasteless, is used both of design and of remarks that go too far. Note tastefully; and that taste in this sense — judgement about beauty — is a metaphor from the mouth that English shares with French and German.
1adjectivetastefulShowing good judgement about what looks right.
“The hotel room was decorated in tasteful shades of grey and cream.”
tasteful is a quality of good judgement.
Taste plus -ful. Taste came from Old French taster, to touch or try, and the sense of aesthetic judgement is a metaphor from the tongue that most European languages made independently.
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
taste
English, today
tasteful
Built from
From taste + ful. taste 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