/ˈrɛlɪʃ/
[noun] A strong feeling of enjoyment or enthusiasm for something; also a condiment or sauce used to add flavour to food. As a verb, it means to enjoy something very much.
Before it meant hot dog topping, 'relish' simply meant the taste left in your mouth after swallowing — the ghost of a good meal.
The word 'relish' begins its life in Old French, with the word 'reles' or 'relaiss', meaning the taste or smell that something leaves behind — the lingering sensation after food or drink has passed. This Old French term came from the verb 'relaissier', meaning to leave behind or release, which itself descended from Latin 'relaxare', meaning to loosen or let go. The chain runs clearly: Latin 'relaxare' → Old French 'relaissier' → Old French 'reles' → Middle English 'relish'. So at its core, relish was never about the food itself, but about what the food left behind — a kind of flavoured echo.
The word entered English in the early 16th century, and its first meaning was purely sensory: the taste or flavour that remained in the mouth after eating or drinking. Writers of the time used it to describe the aftertaste of wine or a good meal. This was a subtle and poetic use — relish was the memory of pleasure, not the pleasure itself. It was already hinting at something deeper than mere food.
By the mid-16th century, the meaning had expanded in a fascinating direction. 'Relish' began to describe not just a taste sensation, but the pleasure or enjoyment one takes in any experience. If you 'relished' something, you savoured it emotionally and mentally, not just physically. This shift from the physical to the psychological is one of the more elegant journeys in the English language — a word that began in the mouth gradually moved into the heart and mind.
The noun sense of a condiment or flavoured sauce — the bright green pickle we put on a hot dog — did not become common until the 18th and 19th centuries. As food culture developed and bottled condiments became part of everyday meals, 'relish' took on this more practical, physical meaning. It made perfect sense: a relish was something added to food to increase pleasure, to give it extra taste — it was, in a way, manufactured relish in the original sense of the word.
What makes 'relish' particularly interesting is how it has held onto both meanings simultaneously without confusion. In modern English, you can 'relish the challenge of a new job' and also 'pass the relish for the burger' in the same afternoon, and no one bats an eye. This double life — one meaning abstract joy, the other a jar in the fridge — is a beautiful accident of history, a word that grew in two directions at once. Few words so naturally bridge the world of feelings and the world of food.