These words all refer to the pleasant sensations accompanying an agreeable taste or flavour. Tasty and delicious are more common in speech and less formal than the other words here considered. Tasty merely refers to a fine flavour; delicious stresses more strongly the great pleasure that attends a fine-tasting food: a tasty hors d’oeuvre; a delicious imported pâté that was eaten by the guests almost as quickly as it could be served. Delicious is not necessarily restricted to pleasure induced by taste: a delicious silence in the park away from the noisy traffic. Taste is nevertheless the most common association with delicious .

Palatable implies more modest or equivocal pleasure than any of the other words of this group. Palatable is now most often used to mean acceptably good or agreeable, especially when the thing tasted has not been regarded as very tasty : Missionaries found the native food palatable if not always delicious . In its extended senses, palatable refers to some saving feature that makes an otherwise unattractive thing or condition acceptable: Being dropped from the singles match was made more palatable to the tennis player by the news that he would play in the doubles.

Flavourful literally means full of flavour, but is more commonly used to mean having a strong and pleasant flavour: a flavourful brew of tea. Toothsome suggests a succulent or voluptuous quality attending a pleasant taste. In figurative uses, in which the word is perhaps more commonly used today, the quality of being appetizing or sensually attractive predominates: a toothsome bevy of bathing beauties. It is often thus used, as in this example, with a humorous or sardonic tone.