deodorise

verbC1Very rare — outside the 30,000 commonest English words, so you will meet it in writing rather than in speechToo rare in one of the two pools to compare — fewer than 20 uses in speech or in writing

To deodorise is to take a bad smell away. Deodorise the fridge, deodorise the room, a spray that deodorises.

Most products that claim to do it only mask the smell with another, and the ones that work absorb or destroy the molecule instead. Bicarbonate of soda is the cheap version that genuinely deodorises.

Definitions of deodorise

1verbdeodoriseTo take a bad smell away.C1
“Sprinkle baking soda in your trainers overnight to deodorise them.”

deodorise is a cleaning.

Also accepted in games: deodorize

Where it comes from

De-, removing, plus odour, from Latin odor, a smell, plus -ise.

Proto-Indo-European
*h₃ed- (smell)
Latin
odor
Old French
odor
Anglo-Norman
odour
Middle English
odour
English
odor
English, today
deodorise

From de + odor + ise. odor comes from Middle English odour, borrowed from Anglo-Norman odour, from Old French odor, from Latin odor. 2

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

← Vocabulary