A quality of taste sensation of which the taste of sucrose is the typical example.
Unless it is utterly bland, a dish of food will either be sweet or savoury. Of these two terms, sweet is the oldest, dating back in English to the ninth century. Since then, not much has happened to the word sweet apart from its becoming a noun—a synonym for candy—about a hundred years ago. Before it entered English, however, the word sweet—or more precisely its ancient precursor—underwent some startling shifts in meaning, shifts that resulted in the emergence of the words persuade, suave, and hedonism, all relatives of sweet. These words trace their origin to a single Indo-European source, a word meaning sweet and pronounced something like swad. Swad evolved quite differently as it entered each of the various branches of the Indo-European family tree. In Greek, for example, it evolved into the word hedone, meaning pleasure, the connection being that pleasure, at least metaphorically, is sweet; the Greek hedone was then borrowed by English to create hedonism, a philosophy in which pure pleasure is the goal of human existence. In Latin, the same Indo-European source—swad—evolved into two words, suavis, meaning agreeable (sweet things are agreeable), and suadere, meaning to advise (good advice is sweet to hear); from these two Latin words, English derived suave, which describes someone who seems sweet and agreeable, as well as persuade, the act of advising someone to do something. Finally, in the Germanic language family the Indo-European swad evolved into swotja, meaning sweet, which in turn developed into the German suss, the Dutch zoot, and the English sweet. As a result of these thousands of years of semantic and phonetic developments, it is possible to write this sentence—”Suave hedonists sweetly persuade”—made up entirely of words that derive from the same Indo-European source.
One of the basic tastes, not bitter, sour or salt.