You take a sip of a complex, barrel-aged stout. Your friend asks, “What’s it like?” You pause, swirling the rich, dark liquid. “It’s… well, it’s dark,” you start, stating the obvious. “And… kind of roasty? Like coffee, but also… sweet? There’s a chocolatey thing, maybe some vanilla. It’s got a… a heavy feeling.”

Contrast this with describing a sunset. “It’s a fiery orange, fading into a soft magenta with streaks of deep violet.” Easy. Precise. Evocative.

Why is there such a chasm between our ability to describe what we see and what we taste or smell? Why does our vocabulary for flavor feel so clumsy and inadequate? The answer lies in a fascinating intersection of neurology, linguistics, and culture, a concept we can call the flavor lexicon.

The Spectrum vs. The Muddle

Our ability to describe color is rooted in the physics of light and the biology of our eyes. Vision is, in many ways, a more straightforward sense. Light exists on a continuous, one-dimensional spectrum of wavelengths. Our eyes have three types of cone cells that are specifically tuned to respond to different parts of this spectrum (short, medium, and long wavelengths, roughly corresponding to blue, green, and red). Our brain processes these signals with incredible precision, allowing us to perceive and, crucially, to name millions of distinct shades. We have abstract words like teal, crimson, indigo, and chartreuse that don’t rely on comparing them to an object.

Flavor, on the other hand, is a chemical free-for-all. It isn’t a single sense, but a multisensory mashup dominated by taste and smell.

• Taste (Gustation): This happens on the tongue and is relatively simple. We are hardwired to detect a handful of basic categories: sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and umami (savory). These are the foundational pillars of flavor, but they are a blunt instrument.

– Smell (Olfaction): This is where the real complexity lives. When you chew and swallow, aromatic compounds from the food waft up the back of your throat into your nasal cavity (this is called retronasal olfaction). Here, they meet hundreds of different types of olfactory receptors, which can collectively identify tens of thousands of different scents.

Unlike the neat spectrum of light, there is no simple, organizing principle for all these chemical combinations. It’s a high-dimensional muddle. The brain receives this firehose of information from the tongue and nose, blends it with tactile sensations like texture, temperature, and spiciness (chemesthesis), and presents it to you as a single, unified experience: flavor. No wonder we struggle to find the words.

Speaking in Metaphors

When faced with a complex, abstract experience we can’t easily label, what does language do? It gets creative and borrows from other domains. Our flavor lexicon is packed with metaphors, primarily drawing from the more concrete world of touch and sight.

Think about how we describe cheese or wine:

• A cheddar can be sharp or mild.
• A wine can be smooth, dry, round, or full-bodied.
• A soda can be crisp or go flat.
• A flavor can be bright or muddy.

None of these words describe the chemical compounds. A “sharp” cheese doesn’t physically cut your tongue. A “round” flavor has no geometric properties. These are tactile and visual metaphors we use to give shape and character to an otherwise amorphous sensation. This isn’t a failure of language; it’s a brilliant cognitive shortcut that allows us to communicate these complex feelings, even if imprecisely.

The Source-Based Shortcut

The other primary tool in our flavor lexicon is the source-based description. If we can’t find an abstract word for a taste, we simply name what it reminds us of. This is perhaps the most common way we talk about flavor.

A wine doesn’t just taste “good”; it has “notes of cherry, tobacco, and leather.” A coffee isn’t just “bitter”; it has a “nutty profile with hints of citrus and dark chocolate.” We say a sauce is lemony, a spice is earthy, a beer is piney, or a dessert is vanilla-y.

This approach is incredibly effective, but it has one major weakness: it relies entirely on shared experience. If a sommelier tells you a wine has notes of lychee and gooseberry, the description is meaningless unless you know precisely what lychees and gooseberries taste like. This is why tasting notes can sometimes feel esoteric or pretentious—they are a specialized dialect built on a foundation of common sensory memories that not everyone possesses.

Hunter-Gatherers of Scent: Are Some Cultures Better?

For a long time, researchers believed this linguistic poverty for smell and taste was a human universal. But recent linguistic anthropology has shown this isn’t true. It seems to be a feature of industrialized, urbanized cultures, not of humanity as a whole.

Enter the Jahai people, a hunter-gatherer group in the Malay Peninsula studied extensively by linguist Asifa Majid. The Jahai have a rich and abstract vocabulary for smells, similar to how English speakers have a rich vocabulary for colors. They don’t have to resort to “it smells like…” Instead, they have dedicated words for different scent categories.

For example:

• Cŋəs describes the pungent, stinging scent of gasoline, smoke, and certain insects.
• Plʔeŋ describes the bloody, fishy, or meaty smell of raw meat and fish.
• Ltpɨt is used for the pleasant, fragrant smell of blooming flowers, ripe fruit, and binturongs (a local bearcat).

These aren’t source-based words; they are abstract odor categories, just like “blue” is an abstract color category. Similar findings have been made among the Maniq people in Thailand. Why are they so good at it? The leading theory is that their hunter-gatherer lifestyle makes a precise sense of smell—and the ability to communicate it—a matter of survival. You need to be able to tell your group about the smell of a ripe, edible fruit versus a poisonous one, or the scent of a predator nearby.

Training Your Palate, Training Your Lexicon

So, are English speakers doomed to a world of vague “roasty” and “earthy” descriptions? Not at all. The existence of cultures like the Jahai proves that our brains and languages are capable of more. The difference is practice and attention.

Experts like sommeliers, coffee roasters, and perfumers spend years training their senses. A key part of that training is explicitly linking sensations to words. By using tools like a “flavor wheel”, they build a robust, shared vocabulary that allows for highly specific communication. The act of consciously trying to name what you’re tasting forces your brain to pay closer attention, to disentangle the multi-sensory knot of flavor into its component parts.

The next time you’re stumped describing a taste, don’t feel bad. You’re wrestling with a genuine cognitive and linguistic challenge. But also see it as an opportunity. By pushing past “it’s good” and reaching for metaphors, sources, and sensations, you’re not just describing the world—you’re training your brain to experience it more richly.