/dɪsˈteɪst/
[noun] A feeling of not liking something, or finding it unpleasant or offensive. It is usually a mild but clear feeling of discomfort or disapproval toward something.
Originally meaning a literal bad taste in the mouth, 'distaste' only slowly became a feeling of the mind rather than the tongue.
The story of 'distaste' begins with the Latin verb 'taxare', meaning to touch, handle, or estimate — which gave rise to 'taxare' in its sense of testing something by feel or flavour. From this root came the Vulgar Latin 'tastare', meaning to touch or sample, which passed into Old French as 'taster', meaning to taste or try. Middle English then borrowed this as 'tasten', giving us the word 'taste' that we know today. The prefix 'dis-', inherited from Latin, carried the force of negation or reversal — turning something into its opposite. When 'dis-' was joined to 'taste' in the 16th century, the result was 'distaste': the undoing or opposite of tasting something pleasurably.
When the word first appeared in English around the 1560s, it was used in a largely physical sense. To have a distaste for something meant, quite literally, that it tasted bad or unpleasant to you — a direct sensation on the tongue. Writers of the Tudor period would use it to describe spoiled food or bitter medicine, the way one might wrinkle a nose at something rotten. The body, not the mind, was at the centre of the word's meaning.
Over the following century, something remarkable happened: 'distaste' began its slow migration inward, from the physical to the emotional. By the 17th century, writers were using it to describe feelings of dislike or moral disapproval that had nothing to do with food at all. One might feel distaste for a rude person's behaviour, or for an idea that seemed wrong or ugly. The mouth no longer needed to be involved. This kind of metaphorical extension — where a word that belongs to the body travels into the world of the mind — is one of the most common and fascinating patterns in the history of the English language.
The related adjective 'distasteful', meaning something that causes distaste or is offensive to the senses or feelings, followed closely behind, and both words settled comfortably into the English vocabulary as ways of expressing a particular kind of moderate, controlled dislike. Distaste is notably different from hatred or disgust; it carries a tone of refined disapproval, the sort of feeling that a person might express with a slight frown rather than a shout. This nuance made it a favourite of novelists and essayists in the 18th and 19th centuries, who used it to signal quiet but firm moral judgement.
The broader family of words connected to the same Latin root 'taxare' is surprisingly large. The chain runs: Latin 'taxare' → Vulgar Latin 'tastare' → Old French 'taster' → Middle English 'tasten' → English 'taste'. From the same Latin root we also get 'tax' itself, via Latin 'taxare' → Old French 'taxer' → English 'tax', because assessing or estimating value was seen as a kind of testing or touching. The sensory and the financial were, in the ancient mind, not so far apart. Words like 'tasteful', 'tasty', 'distasteful', and 'foretaste' all carry this ancient DNA of testing something carefully with the senses before judging its worth.