smoke

UK/sməʊk/US/smoʊk/

nounA25 meanings Very common — you will meet it every day · #600 of 15,258leans spoken

Other forms: smoking, smoked, smokes

Smoke is the grey cloud that rises off anything burning. A bonfire at the end of a garden, a candle just blown out, the smell left in a coat after a barbecue.

To smoke is what a fire does — the damp wood smoked all evening and never caught — and what a person does with a cigarette: "Do you smoke?" asks about the habit, not about this minute. Food is smoked too, hung over slow smoke to cure it and flavour it, which is where smoked salmon and smoked bacon come from. Smoke is uncountable, so it is "a lot of smoke", never "many smokes", though a smoke can mean one cigarette. The idioms are worth having: "go up in smoke" is to come to nothing, and "no smoke without fire" means a rumour has something behind it.

Definitions of smoke

1nounsmokeThe grey or black cloud given off by something burning.A2~34%
“Smoke poured out of the upstairs window.”
2verbcigaretteTo breathe in and out from a burning cigarette, pipe or cigar.A2~48%
“He stopped on the corner to smoke.”
3verbgiveTo give off smoke.A2~2%
“The wet logs smoked but never really caught.”
4verbpreserveTo preserve and flavour food by hanging it in smoke.B2~14%
“They smoke the fish over oak chips.”
5nounact(informal) One cigarette, or the act of smoking it.B1~2%
“He went outside for a smoke.”

Shares are an estimate: a language model read 14 sentences found in the wild and placed 14 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.

Phrases it lives in

go up in smoke — to be destroyed, or to come to nothing
there's no smoke without fire — if people are talking about it, something is probably behind it

Also practised as

verbTo breathe in from a burning cigarette.

Where it comes from

Smoke is old and homegrown: Old English smoca, Middle English smoke, with relatives all along the North Sea — Dutch smook, Middle Low German smôk, and German Schmauch, which is the smoke that comes out of a gun barrel. The noun probably grew out of the verb rather than the other way round.

Middle English
smoke
English, today
smoke

From Middle English smoke. From Middle English smoke, from Old English smoca (“smoke”), probably a derivative of the verb (see below). Related to Dutch smook (“smoke”), Middle Low German smôk (“smoke”), German Schmauch (“smoke (from a gun barrel)”).

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in Nature & Weather

Practise this word

smoke in the wild

The smoke signal is one of the oldest forms of long-distance communication.
Smoke signal
In general smoke signals are used to transmit news, signal danger, or to gather people to a common area.
Smoke signal
A cigarette is a thin cylinder of smoking tobacco rolled in thin paper for smoking.
Cigarette
Cigarette smoking is the most common method of tobacco consumption.
Cigarette
Some North American ham and bacon makers smoke their products over burning corncobs.
Smoking (cooking)

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From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

Related words

Definitions of smoke

1nounsmokeThe grey or black cloud given off by something burning.A2~34%

“Smoke poured out of the upstairs window.”

2verbcigaretteTo breathe in and out from a burning cigarette, pipe or cigar.A2~48%

“He stopped on the corner to smoke.”

3verbgiveTo give off smoke.A2~2%

“The wet logs smoked but never really caught.”

4verbpreserveTo preserve and flavour food by hanging it in smoke.B2~14%

“They smoke the fish over oak chips.”

5nounact(informal) One cigarette, or the act of smoking it.B1~2%

“He went outside for a smoke.”

Shares are an estimate: a language model read 14 sentences found in the wild and placed 14 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.