flavour
Pluralflavours
Verbflavours, flavouring, flavoured
US spellingflavor
Pluralflavours
Formsflavours, flavouring, flavoured
- 1The quality something has for the sense of taste, especially when taste and smell combine to give a single impression.
Slow roasting brings out the full flavour of the tomatoes.
Strawberries picked in June have far more flavour than imported ones in winter.
UsageFood has lots of flavour or is full of flavour; a particular taste can be described as a rich flavour.
Similartaste
- 2Any of the particular tastes in which a product such as a food, sweet, chewing gum or medicine is made or sold.
The cough syrup comes in a cherry flavour that children don't seem to mind.
The new range of crisps includes three limited-edition flavours.
UsageProducts come in flavours (sold in three flavours), and you ask what flavour someone wants.
Similarvariety
- 3The quality that is typical of something and gives an idea of what it is like.
The opening chapter gives a good flavour of the book's dry humour.
The festival has a strongly Irish flavour, with live music in every pub.
UsageOften give a flavour of something, offering a sample; with a place adjective, an Irish flavour, a French flavour.
- 4To give something a particular taste by adding a flavouring to it.
Flavour the sauce with a little smoked paprika before serving.
The brewery flavoured its winter ale with ginger and cinnamon.
UsageUsually flavour food with something; the adjective joins a noun: lemon-flavoured, smoke-flavoured.
- 5A substance that is added to something, such as food or drink, to give it a particular taste.
The packet says the biscuits contain no artificial colours or flavours.
The yoghurt gets its taste from added strawberry flavour rather than real fruit.
UsageOften artificial flavours or natural flavours on food labels; flavouring is a common word for the same thing.
Similaressence
- 6A particular kind or type of something, among others of the same general sort.
The phone runs its own flavour of Android, with a few extra apps.
Populism comes in left-wing and right-wing flavours.
UsageUsually a flavour of something, or things come in different flavours, often of software, politics or ideas.
Less common meanings
- 7The quality that something has for the sense of smell, such as the scent of a flower.
Note
The word's first meaning in English: it came from Old French flaour, a smell, and behind that from Latin flare, to blow, so a flavour was once something carried on the air. Dickens could still find a flavour of rats in a damp house in 1859, though the taste meaning was already in use by then. Today smell, scent or whiff is clearer, and this use belongs to older prose.
Checked 5 Nov 2026 · 5 facts
- The original English meaning concerned smell. en.wiktionary.org
- The word derives from Old French flaour, meaning a smell. en.wiktionary.org
- Its ancestry includes Latin flare, meaning to blow. en.wiktionary.org
- Dickens used flavour of rats to describe a damp house in a work first published in 1859. en.wiktionary.org
- The passage describes a damp house containing a flavour of rats. vsfp.byu.edu
- 8In particle physics, any of the six kinds of quark (up, down, strange, charm, top and bottom) or the six kinds of lepton (electron, muon and tau, and a neutrino matching each).
- 9In the slang of hip-hop, style, especially the personal manner a performer brings to their music or dancing.
Showing meanings only.
Practice
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Origin
In Middle English, flavour meant a smell or odour, usually a pleasant one. English took it from Old French flaour ('smell, odour'), which goes back through Vulgar Latin *flātor ('odour, that which blows') to Latin flātor, 'blower', and the verb flō, flāre, 'to blow, puff'. That Latin verb may come from the Proto-Indo-European root *bʰleh₁- ('to blow'), the same root as English blow.