Scent

How to spell scent

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce scent

What does scent mean?

1. nounA distinctive smell, especially a pleasant one, or the trail of smell left by a person or animal.
2. verbTo perceive or detect something by its smell, or to sense something instinctively.

Scent in a sentence

• noun

  The scent of fresh coffee filled the kitchen.

• verb

  Hunting dogs can scent prey from a great distance.

• noun

  The dog followed the fox by its scent across the field.

• verb

  The investors began to scent trouble in the quarterly figures.

Where does scent come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word arrived in English in the late 1300s from the Old French verb sentir, meaning 'to feel, perceive, or smell', which itself came from the Latin sentire, 'to feel or to perceive'. In its earliest English life it was spelled simply 'sent', matching its sound and its origin as something one perceives through the nose. The puzzling silent c was bolted on only in the 1600s, an unhistorical flourish probably added by analogy with Latin-looking words such as 'science' and 'ascend'. That added letter is precisely the spelling trap, because the root never contained a c at all. The same Latin sentire still lives inside everyday relatives such as 'sense', 'sentiment', and 'consent', all of which trace back to the idea of perceiving or feeling.

How the word is built

• scent (from Latin sentire: to feel, perceive); the silent c was added later and is not original to the root

Words that sound like scent

They sound the same but mean different things, so the meaning decides which spelling to write.

• cent: A unit of money equal to one hundredth of a dollar or euro, or the small coin of that value.
• sent: Past tense of 'send': caused something or someone to be dispatched or conveyed to a destination.