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
Jenny Berg, Allure, 20 Apr. 2025
Dogs' noses are at least 100,000 times as sensitive as a human, and possess up to 300 million olfactory receptors in their noses, compared to around 6 million in a human's nose.
—Rachael O'Connor, MSNBC Newsweek, 8 Apr. 2025
Initial olfactory impressions reveal notes are made of pear, zesty bergamot, and spicy pimento leaf.
—Bianca Salonga, Forbes.com, 5 Apr. 2025
But past research has identified a set of neurons in the fly's brain that boosted the fly's attention to olfactory signals.
—John Timmer, ArsTechnica, 9 Apr. 2025
See All Example Sentences for olfactory
Cite this Entry
“Olfactory.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/olfactory. Accessed 30 Apr. 2025.
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olfactory
adjective
Medical Definition
olfactory
adjective
ōl-
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