nosewitness
nosewitness noun: a witness who gives evidence of what they have smelled.
Noun
nosewitness (plural nosewitnesses)
- A witness who gives evidence of what they have smelled.
- Our language is shot through with expressions that point to this visual primacy: when we need to discover the facts about a crime we seek an eyewitness, not an earwitness. If we were dogs we would probably sniff out a nosewitness but since we are primates and not carnivores we look for someone who...1987 March, David F. Armstrong, “Word, Sign And Object”, in Journal of the Washington Academy of Sciences, volume 77, number 1, →JSTOR, page 28
- In 1988, the Netherlands national soccer team won the UEFA Championship, beating the Soviet Union 2-0. Celebration ensued. According to nosewitnesses, the smell of the locker room included dirty clothes, coconut shampoo, sweat, smelly feet, leather, grass and Champagne. [image caption]2020 December 14, Sophie Haigney, “What Does History Smell Like?”, in The New York Times
Forms of nosewitness
| plural | nosewitnesses |
|---|
Origin of nosewitness
From nose + witness, by analogy with eyewitness and earwitness.
Questions about nosewitness
- What does nosewitness mean?
- Nosewitness means a witness who gives evidence of what they have smelled.
- What part of speech is nosewitness?
- Nosewitness is a noun.
- What is the plural of nosewitness?
- The plural of nosewitness is nosewitnesses.
Words near nosewitness in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: nosewitness (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: “nosewitness.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/nosewitness. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.