Meaning
Something a person learns to like only through repeated exposure, having disliked or been indifferent to it at first - classically strong flavours such as black coffee, blue cheese or whisky, and by extension people, places, works of art and styles whose appeal is not immediate but grows with familiarity. Works as a predicate ('oysters are an acquired taste') or with for ('an acquired taste for opera'). Often a polite hedge - either a compliment to the persistent or a gentle warning that something is off-putting at first. Regional use: General English.
Origin
A product of eighteenth-century aesthetics. Taste had long meant the faculty of judging beauty, and writers contrasted innate response with liking formed by habit and education; acquired taste names the second thing. The OED's factsheet says the earliest known use is in the late 1700s, with earliest evidence before 1792, in the writing of Joshua Reynolds - fittingly, since the phrase began in talk about art. Merriam-Webster independently dates first known use to circa 1792, defining it as something or someone that is not easily or immediately liked or appreciated. The food-and-drink application is now the everyday one, but the phrase was coined against its antonym: natural taste, the response one is born with.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- an acquired taste for
- something of an acquired taste
Usage Examples
- Kimchi was an acquired taste for me - the first jar nearly beat me, but now I put it on everything.
- His dry, mumbling delivery is an acquired taste, and the festival crowd had not acquired it yet.
- Dry martinis are famously an acquired taste; most first-timers wince at the gin and the warm olive brine.