flavor

flavour or flavor (ˈfleɪvə)
—n
1.	taste perceived in food or liquid in the mouth
2.	a substance added to food, etc, to impart a specific taste
3.	a distinctive quality or atmosphere; suggestion: a poem with a Shakespearean flavour
4.	a type or variety: various flavours of graphical interface
5.	physics a property of quarks that enables them to be differentiated into six types: up, down, strange, charm, bottom (or beauty), and top (or truth)
6.	flavour of the month a person or thing that is the most popular at a certain time
—vb
7.	(tr) to impart a flavour, taste, or quality to
[C14: from Old French flaour, from Late Latin flātor (unattested) bad smell, breath, from Latin flāre to blow]
flavor or flavor
—n
—vb
[C14: from Old French flaour, from Late Latin flātor (unattested) bad smell, breath, from Latin flāre to blow]
'flavourer or flavor
—n
'flavorer or flavor
—n
'flavourless or flavor
—adj
'flavorless or flavor
—adj
'flavoursome or flavor
—adj
'flavorsome or flavor
—adj

flavor

of "taste, savor" is 1697, originally "the element in taste which depends on the sense of smell." The -v- is perhaps from infl. of savor.

flavor   (flā'vər)  Pronunciation Key  Any of six classifications of quark varieties, distinguished by mass and electric charge. The flavors have the names up, down, strange, charm, top, and bottom. Protons in atomic nuclei are composed of two up quarks and one down quark, while neutrons consist of one up quark and two down quarks. The flavor of a quark may be changed in interactions involving the weak force.

flavor

n.
1. [common] Variety, type, kind. "DDT commands come in two flavors." "These lights come in two flavors, big red ones and small green ones." "Linux is a flavor of Unix" See vanilla.
2. The attribute that causes something to be flavorful. Usually used in the phrase "yields additional flavor". "This convention yields additional flavor by allowing one to print text either right-side-up or upside-down." See vanilla. This usage was certainly reinforced by the terminology of quantum chromodynamics, in which quarks (the constituents of, e.g., protons) come in six flavors (up, down, strange, charm, top, bottom) and three colors (red, blue, green) -- however, hackish use of `flavor' at MIT predated QCD.
3. The term for `class' (in the object-oriented sense) in the LISP Machine Flavors system. Though the Flavors design has been superseded (notably by the Common LISP CLOS facility), the term `flavor' is still used as a general synonym for `class' by some LISP hackers.

flavor definition

spelling
US spelling of "flavour".
[Jargon File]
(1997-03-18)

flavor

in particle physics, property that distinguishes different members in the two groups of basic building blocks of matter, the quarks and the leptons. There are six flavours of subatomic particle within each of these two groups: six leptons (the electron, the muon, the tau, the electron-neutrino, the muon-neutrino, and the tau-neutrino), and six quarks (designated up, down, charm, strange, top, and bottom).

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