Ambrosia is the food of the gods in ancient Greek mythology, said to grant immortality and extraordinary powers to anyone who ate it. The gods on Mount Olympus feasted on ambrosia while mortals could only dream of tasting it.

The Greeks imagined ambrosia as impossibly delicious, beyond anything humans could create. Some stories describe it as a kind of honey, others as a fragrant fruit. The key idea was that it was divine food, reserved for beings far above ordinary humans. Nectar, the drink of the gods, often appears alongside ambrosia in these ancient tales.

Today we use ambrosia to describe anything extraordinarily delicious or delightful. Your grandmother might call her special dessert “pure ambrosia.” In fact, there's an American dessert called ambrosia salad, made with fruit, coconut, and marshmallows, though it's probably not what Zeus and Athena actually ate.

The word also names a type of plant and even a genus of beetles, but these technical uses are less common than the mythological meaning or the everyday way of saying something tastes divine.