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say it: SOW-ur
sour is an adjective, noun and verb meaning "smelling of fermentation or staleness". It is pronounced /ˈsaʊɚ/ — SOW-ur. It carries 11 recorded senses.
one of the four basic taste sensations; like the taste of vinegar or lemons
showing a brooding ill humor
“a dark scowl”
“the proverbially dour New England Puritan”
“a glum, hopeless shrug”
“he sat in moody silence”
“a morose and unsociable manner”
“a saturnine, almost misanthropic young genius”
“a sour temper”
“a sullen crowd”
a cocktail made of a liquor (especially whiskey or gin) mixed with lemon or lime juice and sugar
the property of being acidic
go sour or spoil
“The milk has soured”
“The wine worked”
“The cream has turned--we have to throw it out”
make sour or more sour
Forms marked · are formed by the regular rule rather than recorded in the source data. English keeps a few hundred irregulars and the rest follow the pattern, so the rule is right far more often than not — but it is a rule, and the mark says so.
Definitions, synonyms and semantic relations for sour come from Princeton University’s WordNet. The pronunciation comes from the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary. Commonness is measured against a corpus of everyday English. Full sources and licences.