A part of my brain says, this is a flavor, how can an opposite exist?
On the other hand my other part of brain says, if opposites can exist for feelings why not for flavors?
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Sign up to join this communityOpposites are determined by context. The opposite of man can be woman, boy, robot, god, alien, teenager, tsar, plant, animal — even though a man is an animal.
Likewise, "the" opposite for sweet can be bitter, or sour, or hideous, or you name it.
If you were to ask most English speakers, they would suggest 'sour' or 'bitter' as the opposite of sweet. I would speculate that this is because while sweetness is usually something which appeals to many people, sourness or bitterness are very much acquired tastes (and can even indicate that something is not fit to eat).
The word bittersweet indicates the tension between 'bitterness' and 'sweetness', and similarly means an intense feeling in which two opposite feelings, such as happiness and regret, are both present. So if one were to choose a single opposite to sweetness, bitterness may idiomatically be the safest choice.
However, in reality, the opposite to sweetness is, as RegDwigнt
indicates, dependent on context, even if you restrict yourself to food and drink.
@Hawk - in the classical liberal arts tradition, there is a distinction made between contraries and contradictories.
Black and white / sweet and sour are contraries.
They refer to species within the same genus (black and white are both colours), or species in contrary genera (truthfulness is a species of virtue; falsity a species of vice).
Genera do not have contraries - there is no contrary for flower, and flavour (your example) if taken as a genus, would not have a contrary.
If taken as a species of sense data, then flavoursome and tasteless would be contraries.
Black and non-black / flavour and non-flavour are contradictories.
If you're interested in pursuing this further, see Sister Miriam Joseph's The Trivium (2002), pp 76-77.