Taste is the sense that lets you detect flavors when you eat or drink. Your tongue has thousands of tiny sensors called taste buds that can recognize sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and savory flavors. When you bite into a lemon, your sense of taste tells you it's sour. When you eat chocolate, it detects sweetness.

The word also describes someone's preferences and judgment about what's good or appealing. When your friend has good taste in music, they pick songs you enjoy hearing. Someone with refined taste in books might choose beautifully written stories over shallow ones. Your taste in clothes shows what styles you prefer to wear.

Having good taste means making thoughtful choices about quality and beauty, whether you're picking out furniture for your room or deciding which movie to watch. People develop their tastes over time through experience: you might acquire a taste for foods you once disliked, or develop more sophisticated taste in art as you see more of it.

You can also taste something briefly, like when a chef tastes the soup before serving it. And when you get just a small experience of something, you might say you got a taste of what it's like, such as getting a taste of victory after winning your first game of the season.