Smell

How to spell smell

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce smell

What does smell mean?

1. nounThe quality of something that is perceived through the nose; an odour.
2. verbTo perceive an odour through the nose, or to give off an odour.

Smell in a sentence

• noun

  The smell of fresh coffee filled the kitchen.

• verb

  They could smell the bread baking from the next room.

• noun

  A faint smell of smoke warned them of the fire.

• verb

  The old gym bag began to smell after a week.

Where does smell come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Smell first appears in Middle English as smellen, with no clearly traceable ancestor in Old English itself, which is part of why its earliest history is murky. It is generally treated as a native Germanic word, though scholars cannot point to a confident cognate in the related languages such as Dutch or German, leaving its deeper roots genuinely uncertain. The verb originally meant simply to perceive an odour, and the noun sense for the odour itself developed soon after in the same medieval period. Over time it broadened to cover both pleasant and unpleasant odours, and only later did it pick up its everyday negative shading, so that to say something 'smells' often hints at a bad odour. The spelling has stayed reassuringly simple, a short word whose only mild trap is remembering the double l at the end.

How the word is built

• smell (single Old English root, no prefix or suffix)