Tasteful describes a thing — clothes, a room, a gift, a piece of music, a joke — that was chosen or made with good judgement about what looks and feels right. Say it and you are praising the person's sense of what suits the moment. The heart of the word is restraint. Tasteful almost never means bright, loud, or expensive; it usually means quiet, simple, well-matched, nothing shouting for attention. A tasteful room is calm colours and a few good pieces, not gold everywhere. So a very costly thing can be untasteful, and a cheap thing can be tasteful. There is a second use that is really about respect: 'a tasteful tribute', 'a tasteful joke about his own age'. Here it means the person handled a delicate subject — death, illness, sex, someone's weakness — without embarrassing anybody. This is why you hear the opposite, tasteless, far more often: a tasteless joke is not badly designed, it is cruel or crude. Though actually, be careful with this word. Because it judges taste, it can sound like the speaker is placing themselves above other people. Among friends it is warm praise; used about someone's home or family, it can sound snobbish. And it is one of those words that is far more common in the mouths of older speakers and in magazines than in ordinary young people's speech, where 'nice' or 'classy' does the same job.