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
Celia Shatzman, Forbes.com, 1 Sep. 2025
Subsequent research has gone deeper into chemical or neurological aspects of olfactory imprinting and geomagnetic navigation, which seems to aid salmon homing at longer distances.
—Greg Uyeno, JSTOR Daily, 27 Aug. 2025
This then attracted microglia, the brain’s immune cells, which engulfed and removed the axons, disrupting olfactory signaling.
—New Atlas, 18 Aug. 2025
After undergoing testing, scans and a biopsy, Barbery was diagnosed with olfactory neuroblastoma, a rare type of cancer that originates in the nasal cavity.
—Vanessa Etienne, People.com, 13 Aug. 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 9 Sep. 2025.
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olfactory
adjective
Medical Definition
olfactory
adjective
ōl-
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