STENCH

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 Dictionary entry overview: What does stench mean? 

• STENCH (noun)
  The noun STENCH has 1 sense:

1. a distinctive odor that is offensively unpleasant

  Familiarity information: STENCH used as a noun is very rare.

 Dictionary entry details 

• STENCH (noun)

Sense 1

Meaning:

A distinctive odor that is offensively unpleasant

Classified under:

Nouns denoting cognitive processes and contents

Synonyms:

fetor; foetor; malodor; malodour; mephitis; reek; stench; stink

Hypernyms ("stench" is a kind of...):

odor; odour; olfactory perception; olfactory sensation; smell (the sensation that results when olfactory receptors in the nose are stimulated by particular chemicals in gaseous form)

Hyponyms (each of the following is a kind of "stench"):

niff; pong (an unpleasant smell)

 Context examples 

The stench of bad beef was in his nostrils, while in his ears, to the accompaniment of creaking timbers and groaning bulkheads, echoed the loud mouth-noises of the eaters.

(Martin Eden, by Jack London)

The pitch was bubbling in the seams; the nasty stench of the place turned me sick; if ever a man smelt fever and dysentery, it was in that abominable anchorage.

(Treasure Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson)

Sometimes they determined to starve me; or at least to shoot me in the face and hands with poisoned arrows, which would soon despatch me; but again they considered, that the stench of so large a carcass might produce a plague in the metropolis, and probably spread through the whole kingdom.

(Gulliver's Travels into several remote nations of the world, by Jonathan Swift)

Under ordinary circumstances such a stench would have brought our enterprise to an end; but this was no ordinary case, and the high and terrible purpose in which we were involved gave us a strength which rose above merely physical considerations.

(Dracula, by Bram Stoker)

You belong with the oxen and the drudges, in dirty surroundings among smells and stenches.

(Martin Eden, by Jack London)

And your friend the secretary, humbly desiring to be heard again, in answer to what the treasurer had objected, concerning the great charge his majesty was at in maintaining you, said, that his excellency, who had the sole disposal of the emperor’s revenue, might easily provide against that evil, by gradually lessening your establishment; by which, for want of sufficient for you would grow weak and faint, and lose your appetite, and consequently, decay, and consume in a few months; neither would the stench of your carcass be then so dangerous, when it should become more than half diminished; and immediately upon your death five or six thousand of his majesty’s subjects might, in two or three days, cut your flesh from your bones, take it away by cart-loads, and bury it in distant parts, to prevent infection, leaving the skeleton as a monument of admiration to posterity.

(Gulliver's Travels into several remote nations of the world, by Jonathan Swift)