Foresmell
noun, verb ·Rare ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 A smell which precedes or comes before something.
"His father, a man of sixty, shorter than Hugh and also pudgier, had aged unappetizingly during his recent widowhood; his things let off a characteristic foresmell, faint but unmistakable, and he grunted and sighed in his sleep, dreaming of large unwieldy blocks of blackness [...]."
- 1 To smell in advance. transitive
""I do not foresmell any immediate harm to thee from the harness, but as you might run a risk in using it, perhaps it will be safest for me to take it," said the Medium."
Example
More examples"His father, a man of sixty, shorter than Hugh and also pudgier, had aged unappetizingly during his recent widowhood; his things let off a characteristic foresmell, faint but unmistakable, and he grunted and sighed in his sleep, dreaming of large unwieldy blocks of blackness [...]."
Etymology
From fore- + smell.
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.