redolent

comparative more redolent · superlative most redolent

1. Fragrant or aromatic; having a sweet scent.

   Synonyms: aromatic, fragrant

2. Having the smell of the article in question.

   His breath is already redolent of whiskey.

   1861, Francis Colburn Adams, chapter 32, in An Outcast

   3 more examples

   Most of the articles were home-made; the bread, the yellow butter, as golden as the cups to which it has given name; the thickest cream, and a honeycomb redolent of the thyme which even then echoed with the hum of the bees.

   1838 (date written), L[etitia] E[lizabeth] L[andon], chapter XIII, in Lady Anne Granard; or, Keeping up Appearances. […], volume I, London: Henry Colburn, […], published 1842, →OCLC, pages 163–164

   Stephen, that is when the accosting figure came to close quarters, though he was not in an over sober state himself recognised Corley's breath redolent of rotten cornjuice.

   1922 February 2, James Joyce, “[Episode 16]”, in Ulysses, Paris: Shakespeare and Company […], →OCLC, part III [Nostos], page 572

   At that instant, Eragon's back ruptured in an explosion of agony so intense, he experienced it with all five senses: as a deafening, crashing waterfall of sound; a metallic taste that coated his tongue; an acrid, eye-watering stench in his nostrils, redolent of vinegar; pulsing colors; and, above all, the feeling that Durza had just laid open his back.

   2005, Christopher Paolini, “The Nature of Evil”, in Eldest, page 372

   Synonyms: reeking, smelling

3. figurativelySuggestive or reminiscent.

   But forth from sweat-shops, tenement and prison Wailed minor protests, redolent with pain.

   1919, Ella Wheeler Wilcox, A vision

   4 more examples

   But, in the country, the green fields are so joyous, the pure air so fresh, the blue sky so clear; the fine old trees, redolent of earth's loveliest mythology, when the dryades peopled their green shadows;...

   1834, L[etitia] E[lizabeth] L[andon], chapter XXV, in Francesca Carrara. […], volume III, London: Richard Bentley, […], (successor to Henry Colburn), →OCLC, page 213

   He said that the geometry of the dream-place he saw was abnormal, non-Euclidean, and loathsomely redolent of spheres and dimensions apart from ours.

   1928 February, H[oward] P[hillips] Lovecraft, “The Call of Cthulhu”, in Farnsworth Wright, editor, Weird Tales: A Magazine of the Bizarre and Unusual, volume XI, number 2, Indianapolis, Ind.: Popular Fiction Publishing Company, →OCLC

   My very photogenic died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three, and, save for a pocket of warmth in the darkest past, nothing of her subsists within the hollows and dells of memory, over which, if you can still stand my style (I am writing under observation), the sun of my infancy had set: surely, you all know those redolent remnants of day suspended, with the midges, about some hedge in bloom or suddenly entered and traversed by the rambler, at the bottom of a hill, in the summer dusk; a furry warmth, golden midges.

   1955 September 15, Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita, Paris: The Olympia Press […], →OCLC

   The sums are so vast, the secrecy so shocking, that “chumocracy” doesn’t begin to capture what Britain has become – redolent as we are of banana republics, the Russian oligarchy and failed states.

   2021 February 22, Polly Toynbee, “The Covid contracts furore is no surprise – Britain has long been a chumocracy”, in The Guardian