Fragrant means smelling sweetly pleasant — flowers, herbs, a fragrant rice, a fragrant evening after rain. The word is always positive, which is what separates it from the neutral smelling and the negative smelly.
It belongs to writing about food, gardens and perfume, and it is a shade more formal than sweet-smelling. The noun is fragrance, and in the perfume trade fragrance is simply the word for a scent product. Note the false friend flagrant, which looks almost identical and means shockingly obvious — a flagrant breach of the rules — and mixing the two produces a memorable sentence for the wrong reasons.
1adjectivefragrantHaving a sweet or pleasant smell.
“The whole kitchen was fragrant with basil.”
fragrant is a quality of smell.
Latin fragrare meant to smell sweet, and its present participle fragrans is the English word almost unchanged. It has never meant anything but a good smell, in any of the languages that borrowed it.
Latin
frāgrāns
English, today
fragrant
Built from
Latin frāgrāns, present active participle of frāgrō (“to smell”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA