Savory metaphorically had its chance, but whiffed it due to decades of being left out of lists of all taste buds produced by people in the west that listed sweet&#x2F;sour&#x2F;bitter&#x2F;salty. This is the same set of lists that also showed the now-discredited &quot;zones&quot; of where each taste bud lives. Savory also means more than just &quot;the flavor detected by the taste buds in question&quot;. For all I know &quot;umami&quot; means more things in Japanese too, but in English the new foreign import word had a chance to get nailed to the <i>exact</i> right concept with no previous baggage, so it won out in this narrow usage. Note it gets used nowhere else, while savory continues to lead the rich, complicated life of a &quot;full&quot; English word.