Perfume

How to spell perfume

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce perfume

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does perfume mean?

1. nounA fragrant liquid, typically made from essential oils, worn on the skin to produce a pleasant smell.
2. verbTo fill or impregnate something with a pleasant smell.

Perfume in a sentence

• noun

  She dabbed a little perfume behind each ear before the dinner.

• verb

  Fresh lilies can perfume an entire room within minutes.

• noun

  The duty-free shop sells designer perfume at a discount.

• verb

  Bakers know that warm bread will perfume the whole street.

Where does perfume come from?

Language of origin: French

This word reaches English through the Italian profumare and the French parfum, but its true root lies in Latin. It combines per, meaning 'through' or 'thoroughly', with fumus, meaning 'smoke', so the literal idea was something produced by smoke passing through the air. That makes sense historically, because the earliest perfumes were fragrant substances burned as incense, and the pleasant smell drifted out as the material smouldered. The word entered English in the 1500s, first describing the agreeable scent of burning matter and only later the prepared fragrant liquids we know today. The buried 'fume' inside it is the same root that gives us 'fumigate' and the everyday 'fumes', a helpful reminder that the ending is spelled fume, not foom.

How the word is built

• per- (through, thoroughly)
• fume (smoke, from Latin fumus)