olfactory
adjective
ōl-
Did you know?
No, olfactory is not a noun meaning “a place that makes scents”; for that, you want perfumery, which makes more sense. Olfactory is instead an adjective used to describe things related to one’s sense of smell, that which lets you detect fruit with your snoot, a leek with your beak, Shiraz with your schnozz. Olfactory comes from the Latin word olfacere (“to smell”), which in turn combines two verbs, olēre (“to give off a smell”) and facere (“to do”). It often appears in scientific contexts (as in “olfactory nerves,” the nerves that pass from the nose to the brain and contain the receptors that make smelling possible), but it is occasionally used in less technical writing and speech. The pleasant smell of hot mulled cider, for example, might be considered an “olfactory delight,” depending on the spices and your own sensibilities, of course. As they say, the nose knows.
Examples of olfactory in a Sentence
William A. Haseltine, Forbes, 16 Jan. 2025
Moving forward, the biologists hope to look into how much ants can adapt their olfactory receptors based on these interactions to see if the knowledge translates on an even deeper level.
—Andrew Paul, Popular Science, 8 Jan. 2025
This blend of mint, musk, and metallic notes is an olfactory ode to the night that Joy Division played at the Les Bains Paris nightclub in 1979.
—Adam Hurly, Robb Report, 7 Jan. 2025
Subsequent research has found large olfactory lexicons in at least forty other languages, among them Fang, Khmer, Swahili, and Zapotec.
—Manvir Singh, The New Yorker, 23 Dec. 2024
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Cite this Entry
“Olfactory.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/olfactory. Accessed 21 Jan. 2025.
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olfactory
adjective
Medical Definition
olfactory
adjective
ōl-
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