flair
Pluralflairs
Often confused with flare
- 1An inborn or natural talent or aptitude for something.
She has a real flair for languages and picked up Italian in a few months.
The coach spotted his flair for defense early and moved him to the back line.
Note
Talent here began as scent: Old French flair meant "scent, odor", from a verb meaning "to reek, smell", and its Latin root is the one behind fragrant. A flair is a kind of nose for something, and it almost always takes for, followed by a noun or an -ing form: a flair for art, a flair for labeling their unhappiness. Gift, knack and talent are close neighbors.
- 2A distinctive, stylish quality; elegance in the way someone dresses, writes or does something.
She decorates small apartments with real flair, using bold colors and secondhand finds.
The new art director brought a certain flair to the magazine's covers.
Similarstyle, elegance, panache, grace, elan
Note
Style shows in how a thing is done, so this sense often follows with: dress with flair, decorate with real flair. Mike Judge's Office Space (1999) gave it a countable twist, where pieces of flair are the badges a waitress must pin to her uniform, and Joanna is asked to wear 37 of them. Panache and élan are its showier cousins.
- 3A smell; an odor given off by something.
Note
The word's first meaning in English, and long obsolete: what a thing gives off to the nose. A modern reader will hear talent or style in it, so a sour flair rising from the barrels would puzzle more than it describes. For the smell of something, smell, scent or odor are the safe words.
Less common meaning
- 4The sense of smell; the power to detect odors.
Note
Where the smell meaning names what the nose picks up, this one names the nose's own power, the way we now say a hound has a keen sense of smell. It too is obsolete. Modern English keeps the idea only figuratively, in a nose for news, and in the talent meaning that grew from it.
Practice
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Origin
From Middle English flayre, from Old French flair ("scent, odour"), from flairier ("to reek, smell"). This comes from Latin flāgrō, a variant of frāgrō ("to give off a sweet smell"), the source of fragrant.