Dictionary

sweetwort en · NOUN

Etymology

From sweet + wort.

Meanings

1. Any of a variety of sweet-tasting plants.
   • As spring opened, they began to find a plant just showing above the ground; it resembled asparagus, and for some reason they called it " Mashka's sweetwort," though it was very bitter 1889, Leo Tolstoy, translated by Nathan Haskell Dole, War and peace, published 1898, page 300:
   • Sweetwort, Acorus calamus 1947, Olive Percival, Our Old-fashioned Flowers, page 208:
   • […] then boil the buds or bark of elder, sweetwort and green brier leaves 1855, Daniel Smith, The Reformed Botanic and Indian Physician, page 383:
   • the hay from upland meadows, with its larger variety of plants, predominantly origanum, a modest plant with pink and white flowers. It is this sweetwort that makes the aroma of hay mown and dried in fine weather exceptionally spicy and exhilarating. 1969, “Soviet Literature”, in (Please provide the book title or journal name), numbers 1-6, page 66:
2. An fermented beverage made from malt.
   • It is you who hold with both hands the great sweetwort, brewing it with honey and wine. 2024, Jill L. Baker, Culinary Technology of the Ancient Near East, page 2018:
3. A sugar-rich liquid, as that used in fermentation.
   • In Alcoholic fermentation yeast is added to some saccharine fluid—such as the "sweetwort" or infusion of malt used in the preparation of beer. 1884, T. Jeffery Parker, “Bacteria”, in The New Zealand Journal of Science, volume 2, number 2, page 52:
   • Barley-sugar. A preparation of sugar made in long yellow sticks, which were flavoured originally with sweetwort, or extract of malt, but now flavoured with lemon. 1885, Edward T. Blakely, A Popular Technical Dictionary of Commercial and General Information, 2 edition, page 32:
   • If allowed to ferment, you have brewed beer. As it is, Sweetwort is sweet (what's in a name) and non-alcoholic. 1999, Mark Braunstein, “Sprout Sweets”, in Sprout Garden:Indoor Grower's Guide to Gourmet Sprouts, page 122:
   • Neither the juice of the beetroot nor the sap of the sugar-cane consists entirely of pure sugar dissolved in pure water. They both contain other constituents common to vegetable juices, and some peculiar to themselves. These mucilaginous matters, when roughly separated, carry down with them some sugar, and form a sort of sweetwort, capable by skilful treatment of producing a rich caramel well suited for mixing with coffee. 1885, William Mattieu Williams, The Chemistry of Cookery, page 97:
   • Cagniard-Latour had indeed shown several years before that yeast consists essentially of the cells of a microscopic fungus which grows as the sweetwort ferments, and he had attributed the breaking up of the sugar into alcohol and carbonic acid to the growth of the micro-organism. 1896, Joseph Lister, “Inter-dependence of Scienxe and the Healing Art”, in The Lancet:

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