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stinking

adjectiveverbnouncommon in dialogue

  • //ˈstɪŋkɪŋ//

Having a pungent smell.

adjective

  1. 1

    Having a pungent smell.

  2. 2

    Very bad and undesirable.

    I have a stinking cold.

  3. 3

    slangVery drunk.

    Oh, I got stinking—and, worse, acted like the world's worst heel to top it off. I passed out mentally about the time we left the club—which must have been around 2:30—but unfortunately didn't pass out physically.

  4. 4

    An intensifier, a hypallage.

    We don’t need your stinking sympathy.

    “Everyone shut up! Lord ThunderSteel commands it! I am your leader! I have this badge that says so!” “We don’t need no stinking badges!”

Etymology

From Middle English stynkynge, stinkinge, stinkinde, stinkende, stynkande, stynkand, from Old English stincende, from Proto-Germanic *stinkwandz (“stinking”), present participle of Proto-Germanic *stinkwaną (“to stink”), equivalent to stink + -ing. Cognate with Dutch stinkend (“stinking, stinky”), German stinkend (“stinking, stinky”), Danish stinkende (“stinking, stinky”), Norwegian stinkende (“stinking, stinky”).

verb

  1. 1

    Also a form of stinkpresent participle and gerund of stink

noun

  1. 1

    The emission of a foul smell.

    From the magnificent ejaculation of the Waimangu geyser, to the tiniest of gaseous emissions, descriptions of the thermal reserve were rife with dischargings, bubblings and stinkings, quiverings and palpitations, orifices and protuberances.

Etymology

From Middle English stinkinge, stynkynge, equivalent to stink + -ing.

Forms

plural
stinkings
comparative
more stinking
superlative
most stinking
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).