How to Use odorant in a Sentence

odorant

noun
  • Because natural gas does not have a smell, an odorant is added to it, to help alert people if there is a leak.
    — Globe Staff, BostonGlobe.com, 28 June 2022
  • Natural gas is odorless, but a foul-smelling odorant called mercaptan is added to alert people to leaks.
    — CBS News, 2 May 2023
  • On the other hand, nine of those 10 odorants for which dogs are clearly more sensitive than humans are carbolic acids.
    — Brian Handwerk, Smithsonian, 22 May 2017
  • Human body odor may result from the breakdown of precursors into a pungent odorant by skin bacteria….
    — Razib Khan, Discover Magazine, 25 Oct. 2010
  • Researchers have managed to teach bees to differentiate between two odorants.
    — Chris Lee, Ars Technica, 5 July 2017
  • Scientists have long known that animals recognize their relatives by their unique odorants, or familial smells.
    — Peter Rowe, sandiegouniontribune.com, 31 Aug. 2017
  • Everything that has an odor releases specific chemicals, called odorants, into the air.
    — Svenja Lohner, Scientific American, 7 June 2018
  • Since research on humans hasn’t yet cleared our view up the nostrils, Mainland has begun studying the odorant molecules directly.
    — Abigail Tucker, Smithsonian Magazine, 22 Sep. 2022
  • That wouldn’t be possible if each odorant molecule had to be uniquely recognized by its own dedicated receptor.
    — Quanta Magazine, 16 Sep. 2021
  • Ants have more than 400 odorant receptors, and Zwiebel says a next step is to determine which of them must function correctly to decode an enemy's smell.
    — Jillian Kramer, Scientific American, 1 May 2020
  • This tissue becomes inflamed, temporarily disrupting the ability of the olfactory neurons to signal the presence of an odorant.
    — John E. Hayes and Cara Exten, CNN, 24 Dec. 2020
  • The agency installed a network of chemical detectors at the Speedway—precise sensors linked to high-accuracy wind gauges revealed how chemical odorants travel in plumes through the air.
    — Dan Dubno, Popular Mechanics, 28 Apr. 2019
  • Plus, many other natural repellents—unlike pyrethrum—work by activating multiple odorant receptors, and researchers still know very little about how those other receptors work.
    — Rachel Nuwer, Scientific American, 19 July 2021
  • The catch being that the odorants were chemically identical, and the only difference was that the hydrogen was replaced with deuterium (deuterium is hydrogen with an extra neutron).
    — Chris Lee, Ars Technica, 5 July 2017
  • This is probably because our odorant receptor variants are quite ancient, with the mutations predating the relatively recent divisions between Asian and European and African populations.
    — Abigail Tucker, Smithsonian Magazine, 22 Sep. 2022
  • Mercaptan, a colorless odorant, was released during routine maintenance at Energy Transfer’s Arlington odorization station, according to a company statement.
    — Elissa Jorgensen, Dallas Morning News, 10 Feb. 2026

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'odorant.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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