Word.ws English Dictionary

sweet-and-sour sauce

sweet-and-sour sauce noun: a sticky sauce used in Chinese cuisine that tastes both sugary and tart.

Noun

sweet-and-sour sauce (countable and uncountable, plural sweet-and-sour sauces)

  1. A sticky sauce used in Chinese cuisine that tastes both sugary and tart.

Forms of sweet-and-sour sauce

pluralsweet-and-sour sauces

Origin of sweet-and-sour sauce

Calque of Chinese 甜酸醬 /甜酸酱 (tiánsuānjiàng, literally “sweet sour sauce”).

Questions about sweet-and-sour sauce

What does sweet-and-sour sauce mean?
Sweet-and-sour sauce means a sticky sauce used in Chinese cuisine that tastes both sugary and tart.
What part of speech is sweet-and-sour sauce?
Sweet-and-sour sauce is a noun.
What is the plural of sweet-and-sour sauce?
The plural of sweet-and-sour sauce is sweet-and-sour sauces.

Words near sweet-and-sour sauce in the dictionary

  1. sweet young things
  2. Sweet's syndrome
  3. sweet-after-death
  4. sweet-amber
  5. sweet-and-sour
  6. sweet-and-sour sauce
  7. sweet-and-sour sauces
  8. sweet-and-sours
  9. sweet-breare
  10. sweet-briar
  11. sweet-briars

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: sweet-and-sour sauce (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Flame, not lame-sweet-and-sour sauce.wav.

Cite this entry: “sweet-and-sour sauce.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/sweet-and-sour_sauce. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.