noun
sorbet
SAW-bay
noun
1
A frozen dessert made from sweetened fruit juice or puree, sometimes lightened with egg white, often served between courses of a meal to cleanse the palate.
"We finished the tasting menu with a scoop of lemon sorbet."
"Unlike ice cream, sorbet contains no dairy."
How to Use Sorbet
Learner’s notesIn plain EnglishFruity, icy dessert with no cream in it — the dairy-free cousin of ice cream.
Common mistake
Don't confuse with sherbet, which in the US usually contains a small amount of dairy; sorbet never does.
Easily confused with
Common pairings
lemon sorbet
a scoop of sorbet
palate-cleansing sorbet
Word Forms
sorbets plural
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We finished the tasting menu with a scoop of lemon _____.
Etymology
Traced back through French and Italian to Ottoman Turkish şerbet and Arabic sharba ("a drink"); a distant relative of both "sherbet" and "syrup."