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cologne

nounverbattested in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//kəˈləʊn//
  • United States//kəˈloʊn//

A type of perfume consisting of 2–5% essential oils, 70–90% alcohol and water.

noun

  1. 1

    A type of perfume consisting of 2–5% essential oils, 70–90% alcohol and water.

    You stink of too much cologne.

    The perfume market has always been a two-tiered one, with a relatively small number of buyers of small bottles of real perfume and eau de parfum that cost large amounts of money, and a larger number of buyers of somewhat larger bottles of cologne and eau de toilette that are considerably more affordable but not always cheap.

    He wore some aftershave or cologne that gave him a heavy, nasty, sweet scent.

  2. 2

    Any of a family of fresh, citrus-based fragrances distilled using extracts from citrus, floral, and woody ingredients, said to have been developed in the early 18th century in Cologne, Germany.

  3. 3

    A fragrance typically worn by a man as opposed to a woman, regardless of its concentration.

Etymology

Ellipsis of eau de Cologne (French eau de Cologne), the name given to the original product in 1709. The success of the original Eau de Cologne inspired many imitators and it has become a genericized trademark. See Cologne. Doublet of colony

verb

  1. 1

    To scent with cologne.

Forms

plural
colognes
past tense
cologned
past participle
cologned
present participle
cologning
third person singular
colognes
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).