flavor

• flavour (British spelling)

From Middle English flavour meaning "smell, odour", usually pleasing, borrowed from Old French flaour (“smell, odour”), from Vulgar Latin *flātor (“odour, that which blows”), from Latin flātor (“blower”), from flō, flāre (“to blow, puff”).

• (Received Pronunciation) IPA^(key): /ˈfleɪvə/
• (General American) IPA^(key): /ˈfleɪvɚ/

• Audio (US)

  (file)

• Rhymes: -eɪvə(r)

flavor (countable and uncountable, plural flavors) (spelling)

1. The quality produced by the sensation of taste or, especially, of taste and smell in combined effect.

   The flavor of this apple pie is delicious.

2. A substance used to produce a taste. Flavoring.

   Flavor was added to the pudding.

3. A variety (of taste) attributed to an object.

   What flavor of bubble gum do you enjoy?

4. The characteristic quality of something.

   the flavor of an experience

5. (informal) A kind or type.

   Debian is one flavor of the Linux operating system.

6. (physics) One of the six types of quarks (top, bottom, strange, charmed, up, and down) or three types of leptons (electron, muon, and tauon).
7. (archaic) The quality produced by the sensation of smell; odour; fragrance.

   the flavor of a rose

   • 1859, Charles Dickens, The Haunted House

     It was damp, it was not free from dry rot, there was a flavor of rats in it, and it was the gloomy victim of that indescribable decay which settles on all the work of man’s hands whenever it’s not turned to man’s account.

flavor (third-person singular simple present flavors, present participle flavoring, simple past and past participle flavored)

1. (transitive) To add flavoring to something.

• gustatory
• gustation