élesztt

élesztt is a Hungarian lexical item that appears primarily in regional dialects and in some historical texts. The word is derived from the base adjective éles, meaning “sharp” or “spicy”, combined with the nominalizing suffix -zt, which creates a noun form. In the linguistic literature it is recorded mainly as a noun referring to a type of pepper or spice that is notably pungent; in some dialects it is also used figuratively to describe an intense or sharp taste in food or in a metaphorical sense to denote a keen or incisive remark.

The earliest documented occurrences of élesztt are found in the 19th‑century folk song collections of Transdanubia and in local oral histories from the eastern Great Plain. In these contexts the term is typically associated with culinary traditions in which fresh or dried pepper is used as a seasoning or as a protective spice in preserving food. In some contemporary sources the word appears in the Hungarian National Corpus as an example of a regional form that has largely fallen out of ordinary use in standard Hungarian.

Scholars of Hungarian dialectology note that élesztt illustrates the productive use of suffixation in the formation of food‑related nouns. While the word is not commonly used in modern standard Hungarian, it remains a point of interest for linguistic studies of regional speech patterns and for the documentation of folk culinary vocabulary. The term serves as an example of the way in which local language communities adapt common lexical bases to describe specific culinary practices.