Word.ws English Dictionary

purell

purell noun: alcohol-based hand sanitizer gel.

Noun (1)

purell (uncountable)

  1. (slang) alcohol-based hand sanitizer gel.

Proper noun capitalized: Purell

Purell

  1. A brand of hand sanitizer containing alcohol.
    • In the Season 11 premiere of “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” Larry David’s HBO comedy of ill manners, chaos breaks out during a party (specifically, a premature funeral) at Albert Brooks’s house when Larry finds a closet stuffed with Purell, toilet paper and KN95 masks, exposing the “Lost in America”...2022 January 7, James Poniewozik, “Wondering When the Pandemic Will End? On TV, It Already Has.”, in The New York Times, →ISSN

Noun (2) capitalized: Purell

Purell (uncountable)

  1. Alternative letter-case form of purell (any alcohol-based hand sanitizer)

Origin of purell

Trademark genericization, from the brand name Purell.

The brand name of a brand of a particular alcoholic sanitizing gel.

Questions about purell

What does purell mean?
Purell means alcohol-based hand sanitizer gel.
What part of speech is purell?
Purell can be a noun or a proper noun.

Words near purell in the dictionary

  1. pureed
  2. pureeing
  3. purees
  4. purehearted
  5. Pureiromba
  6. purell
  7. purely
  8. purely and simply
  9. purely imaginary
  10. purely imaginary number
  11. purely imaginary numbers

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: purell (page history and authors); Purell (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.

Last updated:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: En-au-purell.ogg.

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