Stink

How to spell stink

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce stink

What does stink mean?

1. verbTo give off a strong and unpleasant smell.
2. nounA strong, offensive smell; informally, a public fuss or scandal.

Stink in a sentence

• verb

  The bins by the back door stink in the summer heat.

• noun

  A terrible stink drifted out of the fridge.

• verb

  Old trainers can stink after a long run.

• noun

  The parents kicked up a stink about the new fees.

Where does stink come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word comes from the Old English verb stincan, which meant simply 'to give off a smell' and, surprisingly, could describe a pleasant scent just as easily as a foul one. It belongs to the West Germanic family and has close cousins in the modern Dutch stinken and German stinken, all tracing back to a shared ancestral root for emitting an odour. Over the centuries the meaning narrowed sharply, so that by the later medieval period it referred almost exclusively to a bad smell. The figurative sense, calling a public scandal or a piece of trouble a 'stink', developed much later and is still used informally today. The spelling has stayed admirably simple and phonetic, which is why this is a word almost nobody gets wrong.

How the word is built

• stink (Old English stincan: to emit a smell), a single Germanic root with no prefix or suffix