Word.ws English Dictionary

code smell

code smell noun: anything in a program's source code that suggests the presence of a design problem.

Noun

code smell (plural code smells)

  1. Anything in a program's source code that suggests the presence of a design problem.
    • A well-known code smell is as follows: a function should do one thing.2021, Christian Clausen, Five Lines of Code: How and when to Refactor, Manning, →ISBN, page 4

Forms of code smell

pluralcode smells

Origin of code smell

Analogous to a bad smell indicating e.g. rotten food. Apparently coined by American software engineer Kent Beck, in the late 1990s. Popularized via the book Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code, co-authored by Beck.

Questions about code smell

What does code smell mean?
Code smell means anything in a program's source code that suggests the presence of a design problem.
What part of speech is code smell?
Code smell is a noun.
What is the plural of code smell?
The plural of code smell is code smells.

Words near code smell in the dictionary

  1. code reviewed
  2. code reviewing
  3. code reviews
  4. code rot
  5. code signing
  6. code smell
  7. code smells
  8. code style
  9. code styles
  10. code switch
  11. code switched

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: code smell (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “code smell.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/code_smell. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.