Word.ws English Dictionary

fusel

fusel is the ellipsis of fusel oil.

Meaning of fusel oil

Noun

fusel oil (plural fusel oils)

  1. A mixture of several higher-order alcohols (having more than two carbon atoms) formed as byproduct in the normal fermentation process, captured as part of the tailings in distillation. An excessive concentration, as in low-quality moonshine, causes unpleasant taste.
    • As for drinking, I am something of a chemist and I have yet to find a liquor that is free from traces of a number of poisons, some of them deadly, such as fusel oil, acetic acid, ethylacetate, acetaldehyde and furfurol.1959, Ian Fleming, chapter 11, in Goldfinger

Synonyms of fusel

Forms of fusel

pluralfusels

Phrases with fusel

Questions about fusel

What is fusel the ellipsis of?
Fusel is the ellipsis of fusel oil.

Words near fusel in the dictionary

  1. fusees
  2. fusegate
  3. fusegates
  4. fuseki
  5. fusekis
  6. fusel
  7. fusel alcohol
  8. fusel alcohols
  9. fusel oil
  10. fusel oils
  11. fuselage

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: fusel (page history and authors); fusel oil (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: “fusel.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/fusel. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.