Word.ws English Dictionary

smell blood

smell blood verb: to sense that one has an advantage over an adversary or rival.

Verb

smell blood (third-person singular simple present smells blood, present participle smelling blood, simple past and past participle smelled blood or smelt blood)

  1. (idiomatic, informal) To sense that one has an advantage over an adversary or rival.
    • Later he intended to continue his goading of Neil. He could smell blood now; if only he could get the man to fall apart in one of their clubs.1995, Jane Feather, Valentine, →ISBN, page 392
    • Smelling blood in the economic meltdown, the lower house of parliament, or Duma, took the offensive, calling for Yeltsin to resign.1998 September 7, Paul Quinn-Judge, “Russian Roulette”, in Time

Synonyms of smell blood

Forms of smell blood

third-person singular presentsmells blood
present participlesmelling blood
past participlesmelled blood
pastsmelled blood
past participlesmelt blood
pastsmelt blood

Questions about smell blood

What does smell blood mean?
Smell blood means to sense that one has an advantage over an adversary or rival.
What part of speech is smell blood?
Smell blood is a verb.
What is the past tense of smell blood?
The past tense of smell blood is smelled blood.

Words near smell blood in the dictionary

  1. Smelcers
  2. smell
  3. smell a fox
  4. smell a rat
  5. smell blindness
  6. smell blood
  7. smell blood in the water
  8. smell fishy
  9. smell fox
  10. smell foxes
  11. smell like a rose

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: smell blood (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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: En-au-smell blood.ogg.

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