Other forms: smells, smelling, smelled
To smell is to notice something through your nose, and also to give off a smell. That double direction is unusual and is the thing to learn: the dog smells the food, and the food smells good. Both are correct and the subject tells you which is meant.
The past is smelled or smelt, and both are standard — smelt is more British, smelled more American, and neither is wrong anywhere. Used with no adjective, smell is negative: it smells means it smells bad. Add a word and the judgement changes: it smells lovely. The noun covers the sense itself and the thing sensed, and the neutral formal word for the sense is olfaction, which nobody says. Scent, aroma and odour rank from pleasant to unpleasant.
1verbsmellTo notice something through your nose.~25%
“I can smell burning.”
2verbgiveTo give off a smell.~9%
“The kitchen smells wonderful.”
3nounscentThe quality something has that you notice through your nose.~33%
“There was a smell of wet paint in the hall.”
4nounsenseThe sense that lets you notice smells.~33%
“Her sense of smell came back after a fortnight.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 12 sentences found in the wild and placed 12 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
smell is a sense, or what it detects.
The word appears in Middle English with no clear relatives in the other Germanic languages, which is unusual for a word this basic. The likeliest root means to smoulder or burn — a smell was, first, the smoke you noticed.
Proto-Indo-European
*(s)meld-
Middle English
smellen
English, today
smell
Built from
From Middle English smellen. From Middle English smellen, smillen, smyllen, smullen, from Old English smyllan, smiellan (“to smell, emit fumes”), from Proto-West Germanic smallijan (“to glow, burn, smoulder”), from Proto-Indo-European smel- (“to burn, smoke, smoulder; tar, pitch”). The noun is from Middle English smel, smil, smul (“smell, odour”). Related to stq smeele (“to smoulder”), Middle Dutch smolen (“to burn, smoulder”) (whence Dutch smeulen (“to smoulder”)), Middle Low German smölen (“to be hazy, be dusty”) (whence Low German smölen (“smoulder”)), Low German smullen (“emit smoke”), vls smoel (“stuffy, muggy, hazy”), Danish smul (“dust, powder”), Lithuanian smilkyti (“to incense, fumigate”), Lithuanian smilkti (“to smudge, smolder, fume, reek”), Lithuanian smalkinti (“to fume”), mga smál, smól, smúal (“fire, gleed, embers, ashes”), Russian смола́ (“resin, tar”). Compare smoulder, smother.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA