Home → Irregular verbs → smell

Past tense of “smell”

👃 To notice something with your nose; to have a scent.

Number 108 of 175 by frequency — common in reading and television, less so in your own speech, and the past and the participle are both smelt. Recognising it is the priority.

British and American English

British English prefers the short -t ending, smelt; American English regularises it to smelled. Both are correct, and a whole group behaves this way — burn, learn, dream, smell, spell — so learning one teaches you the rest.

Two forms, learned as one word

The past simple and the past participle are the same word, smelt. Half the work disappears: learn smell · smelt and you have the whole verb. What is left is telling the two jobs apart — The kitchen smelt of fresh bread. is the past simple, The milk has smelt strange since yesterday. is the perfect, and have does all the signalling.

There is no tidy rule connecting smell to smelt — this is a verb you memorise as a pair and stop analysing. The consolation is that it is a pair and not a trio: smelled is the only wrong answer worth guarding against.

The same pattern — twins — runs through 73 verbs: