reek
verb
- to emit a strong odor or be extremely bad
noun
No English definition recorded for this entry.
L326520 on Wikidata ↗Wiktionary
Pronunciation: /riːk/
noun
Etymology: Probably a transferred use (after Irish cruach (“stack (of corn), pile, mountain, hill”)) of a variant of rick, with which it is cognate.
- A hill; a mountain.
verb
Etymology: From Middle English reken (“to smoke”), from Old English rēocan, from Proto-West Germanic *reukan, from Proto-Germanic *reukaną, from Proto-Indo-European *rougi-. See above. Related to Dutch ruiken, Low German rüken, German riechen, Danish ryge, Swedish ryka.
- To have or give off a strong, unpleasant smell.
“You reek of perfume.”
“Your fridge reeks of egg.”
- To be evidently associated with something unpleasant.
“The boss appointing his nephew as a director reeks of nepotism.”
- To be emitted or exhaled, emanate, as of vapour or perfume.
- To emit smoke or vapour; to steam.
“[…] innumerable Legions of his Angels of Light, the warm gleames of whose presence is able to make the Mountains to reek and smoak, and to awake that fiery principle that lies dormient in the Earth into a devouring flame.”
- To cause (something) to smell.
“The slaughter of lambs in offering reeked the fore-courts of the Temple.”
“[I]f we get caught we're for the gibbet and the chains. Our flesh will reek the wind.”
- To fall in such a way (e.g. particularly finely or heavily) as to resemble smoke.
“... the snow still darkens the air, and reeks along the curling wreaths, as if each were a furnace.”
“the sun, which had been occasionally peeping from amidst the windy, rain-reeking clouds, was getting ominously low. One part, however, of the man's prophecy was not borne out - the weather steadily improved and the wind dropped.”