DICT.TW Dictionary Taiwan

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