What is "taste"

Taste \Taste\ (t[=a]st), v. t. [imp. & p. p. Tasted; p. pr. & vb. n. Tasting.] [OE. tasten to feel, to taste, OF. taster, F. tater to feel, to try by the touch, to try, to taste, (assumed) LL. taxitare, fr. L. taxare to touch sharply, to estimate. See Tax, v. t.]

1. To try by the touch; to handle; as, to taste a bow. [Obs.]
   --Chapman.

   Taste it well and stone thou shalt it find.
   --Chaucer.

2. To try by the touch of the tongue; to perceive the relish or flavor of (anything) by taking a small quantity into a mouth. Also used figuratively.

   When the ruler of the feast had tasted the water that was made wine.
   --John ii. 9.

   When Commodus had once tasted human blood, he became incapable of pity or remorse.
   --Gibbon.

3. To try by eating a little; to eat a small quantity of.

   I tasted a little of this honey.
   --1 Sam. xiv. 29.

4. To become acquainted with by actual trial; to essay; to experience; to undergo.

   He . . . should taste death for every man.
   --Heb. ii. 9.

5. To partake of; to participate in; -- usually with an implied sense of relish or pleasure.

   Thou . . . wilt taste No pleasure, though in pleasure, solitary.
   --Milton.

Taste \Taste\, v. i.

1. To try food with the mouth; to eat or drink a little only; to try the flavor of anything; as, to taste of each kind of wine.

2. To have a smack; to excite a particular sensation, by which the specific quality or flavor is distinguished; to have a particular quality or character; as, this water tastes brackish; the milk tastes of garlic.

   Yea, every idle, nice, and wanton reason Shall to the king taste of this action.
   --Shak.

3. To take sparingly.

   For age but tastes of pleasures, youth devours.
   --Dryden.

4. To have perception, experience, or enjoyment; to partake; as, to taste of nature's bounty.
   --Waller.

   The valiant never taste of death but once.
   --Shak.

Taste \Taste\, n.

1. The act of tasting; gustation.

2. A particular sensation excited by the application of a substance to the tongue; the quality or savor of any substance as perceived by means of the tongue; flavor; as, the taste of an orange or an apple; a bitter taste; an acid taste; a sweet taste.

3. (Physiol.) The one of the five senses by which certain properties of bodies (called their taste, savor, flavor) are ascertained by contact with the organs of taste.

   Note: Taste depends mainly on the contact of soluble matter with the terminal organs (connected with branches of the glossopharyngeal and other nerves) in the papill[ae] on the surface of the tongue. The base of the tongue is considered most sensitive to bitter substances, the point to sweet and acid substances.

4. Intellectual relish; liking; fondness; -- formerly with of, now with for; as, he had no taste for study.

   I have no taste Of popular applause.
   --Dryden.

5. The power of perceiving and relishing excellence in human performances; the faculty of discerning beauty, order, congruity, proportion, symmetry, or whatever constitutes excellence, particularly in the fine arts and belles-letters; critical judgment; discernment.

6. Manner, with respect to what is pleasing, refined, or in accordance with good usage; style; as, music composed in good taste; an epitaph in bad taste.

7. Essay; trial; experience; experiment.
   --Shak.

8. A small portion given as a specimen; a little piece tasted or eaten; a bit.
   --Bacon.

9. A kind of narrow and thin silk ribbon.

   Syn: Savor; relish; flavor; sensibility; gout.

   Usage: Taste, Sensibility, Judgment. Some consider taste as a mere sensibility, and others as a simple exercise of judgment; but a union of both is requisite to the existence of anything which deserves the name. An original sense of the beautiful is just as necessary to [ae]sthetic judgments, as a sense of right and wrong to the formation of any just conclusions on moral subjects. But this ``sense of the beautiful'' is not an arbitrary principle. It is under the guidance of reason; it grows in delicacy and correctness with the progress of the individual and of society at large; it has its laws, which are seated in the nature of man; and it is in the development of these laws that we find the true ``standard of taste.''

   What, then, is taste, but those internal powers, Active and strong, and feelingly alive To each fine impulse? a discerning sense Of decent and sublime, with quick disgust From things deformed, or disarranged, or gross In species? This, nor gems, nor stores of gold, Nor purple state, nor culture, can bestow, But God alone, when first his active hand Imprints the secret bias of the soul.
   --Akenside.

   Taste buds, or Taste goblets (Anat.), the flask-shaped end organs of taste in the epithelium of the tongue. They are made up of modified epithelial cells arranged somewhat like leaves in a bud.

c.1300, "to touch, to handle," from Old French taster "to taste, sample by mouth; enjoy" (13c.), earlier "to feel, touch, pat, stroke" (12c., Modern French tâter), from Vulgar Latin *tastare, apparently an alteration (perhaps by influence of gustare) of taxtare, a frequentative form of Latin taxare "evaluate, handle" (see tax (v.)). Meaning "to take a little food or drink" is from c.1300; that of "to perceive by sense of taste" is recorded from mid-14c. Of substances, "to have a certain taste or flavor," it is attested from 1550s (replaced native smack (v.3) in this sense). For another PIE root in this sense, see gusto.\n\nThe Hindus recognized six principal varieties of taste with sixty-three possible mixtures ... the Greeks eight .... These included the four that are now regarded as fundamental, namely 'sweet,' 'bitter,' 'acid,' 'salt.' ... The others were 'pungent' (Gk. drimys, Skt. katuka-), 'astringent' (Gk. stryphnos, Skt. kasaya-), and, for the Greeks, 'rough, harsh' (austeros), 'oily, greasy' (liparos), with the occasional addition of 'winy' (oinodes).

[Buck]

early 14c., "act of tasting," from Old French tast "sense of touch" (Modern French tât), from taster (see taste (v.)). From late 14c. as "a small portion given;" also "faculty or sense by which the flavor of a thing is discerned;" also "savor, sapidity, flavor."\n

\nMeaning "aesthetic judgment, faculty of discerning and appreciating what is excellent" is first attested 1670s (compare French goût, German geschmack, Russian vkus, etc.).\n\nOf all the five senses, 'taste' is the one most closely associated with fine discrimination, hence the familiar secondary uses of words for 'taste, good taste' with reference to aesthetic appreciation. [Buck]\n

\n\n
\nTaste is active, deciding, choosing, changing, arranging, etc.; sensibility is passive, the power to feel, susceptibility of impression, as from the beautiful.

[Century Dictionary]

n. 1 One of the sensations produced by the tongue in response to certain chemicals (http://en.wikipedi

1. org/wiki/Taste). 2 (lb en countable and uncountable) A person's implicit set of preferences, especially esthetic, though also culinary, sartorial, etc. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taste%20(sociology)). v

2. 1 (context transitive English) To sample the flavor of something orally. 2 (context intransitive English) To have a taste; to excite a particular sensation by which flavour is distinguished. 3 To experience. 4 To take sparingly. 5 To try by eating a little; to eat a small quantity of. 6 (context obsolete English) To try by the touch; to handle.

1. v. have flavor; taste of something [syn: savor, savour]

2. take a sample of; "Try these new crackers"; "Sample the regional dishes" [syn: sample, try, try out]

3. perceive by the sense of taste; "Can you taste the garlic?"

4. have a distinctive or characteristic taste; "This tastes of nutmeg" [syn: smack]

5. distinguish flavors; "We tasted wines last night"

6. experience briefly; "The ex-slave tasted freedom shortly before she died"

1. n. the sensation that results when taste buds in the tongue and throat convey information about the chemical composition of a soluble stimulus; "the candy left him with a bad taste"; "the melon had a delicious taste" [syn: taste sensation, gustatory sensation, taste perception, gustatory perception]

2. a strong liking; "my own preference is for good literature"; "the Irish have a penchant for blarney" [syn: preference, penchant, predilection]

3. delicate discrimination (especially of aesthetic values); "arrogance and lack of taste contributed to his rapid success"; "to ask at that particular time was the ultimate in bad taste" [syn: appreciation, discernment, perceptiveness]

4. a brief experience of something; "he got a taste of life on the wild side"; "she enjoyed her brief taste of independence"

5. a small amount eaten or drunk; "take a taste--you'll like it" [syn: mouthful]

6. the faculty of taste; "his cold deprived him of his sense of taste" [syn: gustation, sense of taste, gustatory modality]

7. a kind of sensing; distinguishing substances by means of the taste buds; "a wine tasting" [syn: tasting]

Taste is an Irish rock and blues band formed in 1966. Its founder was songwriter and musician Rory Gallagher.

Taste is a chain supermarket in Hong Kong owned by AS Watson, a wholly owned subsidiary of Hutchison Whampoa Limited. It began the first branch in Festival Walk, Kowloon Tong in 2004, but most of the branches are opened based on the re-decoration of Park'n Shop, Taste's sister company. Its main customers are middle-class families. Its retail products are similar to those in Park'n Shop and Great.

Taste was the debut album by the Irish rock band of the same name, released in 1969.

Taste is a cookery television program which first aired in the United Kingdom on Sky One in 2005. The show had 65 60-minute long episodes (45 minutes without adverts) since October 2005 and is presented by Beverley Turner.

In the early hours of weekday mornings it is repeated on Sky Three, All recipes on the show can be found on the website.

Taste is the first studio album by The Telescopes, released in 1989 on What Goes On. After What Goes On folded, the album was re-released in 1990 by Cheree, and later released in 2006 by Rev-Ola to include live versions of "There Is No Floor", “ Sadness Pale”, “Threadbare” and “Suicide”.

All songs written by Stephen Lawrie. Produced by Richard Formby and Engineered by Ken MacPherson and Chris Bell at The Track Station, Burton-upon-Trent.

Taste is the seventh studio album by Montreal-based indie rock band Islands. It was released on May 13, 2016.

Taste is a Macintosh word processor that combined a number of basic features from page layout software, just a "taste" of it, to build a unique solution to preparing documents. Taste was originally offered by DeltaPoint, the publishers of the famed MindWrite, but was eventually spun off to a 3rd party before finally disappearing. Taste works with Mac OS 9, but not Mac OS X, and has not been available for purchase for several years. In many ways Apple's recent Pages application shares the basic "idea" of Taste, combining word processing with page layout.

Like a word processor, Taste allowed the user to simply start typing and continue doing so until they were finished. There was no need, as in a typical page layout program, to create a box to hold the text, or manually add pages or link columns as the document grew. Like a page layout program, Taste also allowed the user to add these boxes if needed, as well as adjust the distance between characters ( kerning) or between lines in a paragraph. Fairly complex graphics can be created within this program.

Oddly Taste also lacks a number of features of MindWrite, although it appears to have been written by an entirely different programming team. For instance, Taste does not have a built-in outliner, the "killer feature" of MindWrite which made it a favorite for many years. Nor does Taste include features like sorting or list generation.

Taste is generally considered very complex. As a result, it is sometimes said to be temperamental, and users who make complex documents and edit them in major ways have learned to keep good backup files. Sometimes documents become corrupted and it becomes difficult or impossible to recover the data.

In sociology, taste is an individual's personal and cultural patterns of choice and preference. Taste is drawing distinctions between things such as styles, manners, consumer goods and works of art and relating to these. Social inquiry of taste is about the human ability to judge what is beautiful, good and proper.

Social and cultural phenomena concerning taste are closely associated to social relations and dynamics between people. The concept of social taste is therefore rarely separated from its accompanying sociological concepts. An understanding of taste as something that is expressed in actions between people helps to perceive many social phenomena that would otherwise be inconceivable.

Aesthetic preferences and attendance to various cultural events are associated with education and social origin. Different socioeconomic groups are likely to have different tastes. Social class is one of the prominent factors structuring taste.

Taste is one of the senses, namely the physical ability to detect flavors.

Taste may also refer to:

• Taste (sociology), the sociological concept of expressing preferences deemed appropriate or inappropriate by society
• Taste (software), a Macintosh word processor
• Taste (supermarket) a supermarket, part of the AS Watson Group, Hong Kong
• Taste (TV series), a 2005 cookery television show
• Taste, a 2004 TV-movie starring Richard Ruccolo
• "Taste" (short story), a short story by Roald Dahl
• Taste (band), an Irish rock band formed in the 1960s
• Tasters (band), an Italian metalcore band
• Taste Media, a record label
• Taste (The Telescopes album), 1989
• Taste (Taste album), 1969
• "Taste", a song by Animal Collective from their 2009 Merriweather Post Pavilion
• "Taste", a song by Phish from their 1996 album Billy Breathes
• "Taste", a song by Ride from their 1990 Nowhere

"Taste" is a short story by Roald Dahl that was first published in the March 1945 issue of Ladies Home Journal. It later appeared in the Dec 8 1951 New Yorker and the 1953 collection Someone Like You.

There are six people eating a fine dinner at the house of Mike Schofield, a London stockbroker: Mike, his wife and daughter, an unnamed narrator and his wife, and a wine connoisseur, Richard Pratt. Pratt often makes small bets with Schofield to guess what wine is being served at the table, but during the night in the story he is uninterested, instead attempting to socialize with Schofield's eighteen-year-old daughter, Louise.

When Schofield brings the second wine of the night he remarks that it will be impossible to guess where it is from, but Pratt takes that as a challenge. The tough talk on both sides leads the two to increase the bet until Pratt declares that he would like to bet for the hand of Schofield's daughter in marriage—if he loses, he will give Schofield both of his houses. Though his wife and daughter are understandably horrified, Mike eventually convinces them to accept the bet—it is too good a deal to pass up, especially since the wine will be impossible to identify.

However, Pratt proceeds to name the district, commune, vineyard, and the year of the wine (though Mike doesn't turn over the bottle, his reaction appears to be one of disbelief that Pratt could have guessed correctly). At this moment, however, the maid walks in and returns to Pratt his glasses, which he had left on the cabinet in the study earlier in the evening where the bottle had been left out to reach room temperature. (Pratt had picked out this place in the study on an earlier visit as the ideal place to sit the wine—his glasses being left there reveals that he knew the wine in advance and cheated on the bet.) The story ends with Mike starting to get angry and his wife telling him to calm down.

Taste, gustatory perception, or gustation is one of the five traditional senses that belongs to the gustatory system.

Taste is the sensation produced when a substance in the mouth reacts chemically with taste receptor cells located on taste buds in the oral cavity, mostly on the tongue. Taste, along with smell ( olfaction) and trigeminal nerve stimulation (registering texture, pain, and temperature), determines flavors of food or other substances. Humans have taste receptors on taste buds (gustatory calyculi) and other areas including the upper surface of the tongue and the epiglottis.

The tongue is covered with thousands of small bumps called papillae, which are visible to the naked eye. Within each papilla are hundreds of taste buds. The exception to this is the filiform papillae that do not contain taste buds. There are between 2000 and 5000 taste buds that are located on the back and front of the tongue. Others are located on the roof, sides and back of the mouth, and in the throat. Each taste bud contains 50 to 100 taste receptor cells.

The sensation of taste includes five established basic tastes: sweetness, sourness, saltiness, bitterness, and umami. Taste buds are able to differentiate among different tastes through detecting interaction with different molecules or ions. Sweet, umami, and bitter tastes are triggered by the binding of molecules to G protein-coupled receptors on the cell membranes of taste buds. Saltiness and sourness are perceived when alkali metal or hydrogen ions enter taste buds, respectively.

The basic tastes contribute only partially to the sensation and flavor of food in the mouth—other factors include smell, detected by the olfactory epithelium of the nose; texture,

• Food texture: measurement and perception (page 36/311) Andrew J. Rosenthal. Springer, 1999.
• Food texture: measurement and perception (page 3/311) Andrew J. Rosenthal. Springer, 1999. detected through a variety of mechanoreceptors, muscle nerves, etc.; temperature, detected by thermoreceptors; and "coolness" (such as of menthol) and "hotness" ( pungency), through chemesthesis.

As taste senses both harmful and beneficial things, all basic tastes are classified as either aversive or appetitive, depending upon the effect the things they sense have on our bodies. Sweetness helps to identify energy-rich foods, while bitterness serves as a warning sign of poisons.

Among humans, taste perception begins to fade around 50 years of age because of loss of tongue papillae and a general decrease in saliva production. Also, not all mammals share the same taste senses: some rodents can taste starch (which humans cannot), cats cannot taste sweetness, and several other carnivores including hyenas, dolphins, and sea lions, have lost the ability to sense up to four of their ancestral five taste senses.