gastronome means a lover of good food; a connoisseur or gourmet. It carries an Arena rating of 1529, earned across 2 head-to-head judged battles.
Among words judged in Lexicurio's Arena, gastronome ranks #1,743 of 17,126 for Most Satisfying to Say, #3,405 of 17,130 for Most Beautiful Words, #3,826 of 17,126 for Most Elegant Words, #7,172 of 17,140 for Most Whimsical Words.
Why “gastronome” is a great word
A person of refined and scholarly appreciation for food and drink, a connoisseur who approaches the table as a discipline. From the French 'gastronome', a back-formation from 'gastronomie' (gastronomy), itself from the Greek 'gastēr' ("stomach") and 'nomos' ("law" or "knowledge"), first attested in English in the early nineteenth century. Unlike a gourmand, whose pleasure is rooted in hearty appetite, or an epicure, who pursues refined sensual delight, the gastronome is an intellectual disciple—the quiet scholar who can trace a cheese to its specific hillside, understand why a sauce breaks, and interrogate a dish as a text. It is the archival memory for a vineyard’s forgotten vintage, the fingertip testing the taut warmth of a just-baked loaf, the practiced tongue mapping the mineral cool of an oyster: a devotion to the laws of taste as a form of understanding, a hunger to know disguised as appetite.
Etymology
Borrowed from French gastronome.
noun
- a lover of good food; a connoisseur or gourmete.g.“A gastronome ought to fast sometimes on principle: we appreciate no pleasures unless we are occasionally debarred from them. Restraint is the golden rule of enjoyment.” — 1831, L[etitia] E[lizabeth] L[andon], chapter XI, in Romance and Reality. […], volume III, London: Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley, […], →OCLC, page 231:
Definitions & examples from Wiktionary (CC BY-SA 3.0).
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