Strong aversion or distaste at something offensive or sickening.
Strong aversion or distaste at something offensive or sickening — the broad base term, physical or moral.
The base-level term and the most everyday: it covers both physical disgust (rotten food, a foul smell) and moral disgust (offensive behavior). Less violently recoiling than revulsion, less principled than repugnance, less settled and enduring than loathing or abhorrence, and far stronger than mild distaste. Unlike contempt, disdain, or scorn (which look down on something as beneath one), disgust pushes something away as foul.
1590s, from French desgoust “strong dislike,” literally “distaste,” from des- “opposite of” + gouster “to taste,” from Latin gustare “to taste.” The literal root is “un-taste.”
Moved from the literal “distaste, aversion to the taste of” (1610s) to today's strong physical-and-moral revulsion; etymonline notes “the sense has strengthened over time.” In early use the verb's roles were reversed (a person could “disgust” = dislike a food). No reliable recent-generation shift.