Stinks

How to spell stinks

6 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce stinks

What does stinks mean?

1. verbGives off a strong, unpleasant smell; (informally) is very bad or unfair.

Stinks in a sentence

• The bin stinks if you forget to empty it before the weekend.

• The whole flat stinks of burnt toast this morning.

Where does stinks come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is the third-person singular of the verb 'stink', which descends from the Old English stincan, meaning simply 'to give off a smell'. In its earliest use the word was neutral and could describe a pleasant scent as well as a foul one, only narrowing over the centuries to mean specifically a bad or offensive odour. It belongs to a wide Germanic family, with close cousins in the Dutch stinken and the German stinken, all built on a shared root tied to rising vapour or dust. The strong-verb pattern that gives us 'stank' and 'stunk' is a hallmark of these old Germanic verbs, the same machinery behind sing, sang, sung. The spelling stays phonetic and regular: the only thing to watch is that the -nks ending is written exactly as it sounds, with no stray letters.

How the word is built

• stink (Old English stincan: to emit a smell)
• -s (third-person singular present)