How to Use smelt in a Sentence

smelt

1 of 2 noun
  • The smelt have gone, as have the alewives that come in after them.
    — Tom Opre, Outdoor Life, 2 July 2026
  • The young bird spreads its wings, bends down, and snatches the smelt.
    — Melody Bentz, Smithsonian Magazine, 8 July 2021
  • Dozens of smelt flipped and slapped their bodies, the sound like rain on a sidewalk.
    — Ryan Knighton, Popular Mechanics, 6 Oct. 2016
  • To subscribe to the Free Press for about the cost of a frozen smelt, click here.
    — Detroit Free Press, 10 Nov. 2022
  • So do herring and smelt, which are critical prey for salmon, as well as killer whales and many birds.
    — National Geographic, 2 June 2016
  • Commercial netting with a few boats is the only way to gauge the strength of smelt runs.
    — Bill Monroe, OregonLive.com, 13 Mar. 2018
  • Roast oily fish like smelt, sardines, fresh anchovies over the fire to bring out the right amount of brininess.
    — Ashley Mason, Bon Appetit, 25 May 2017
  • Then populations of eel and smelt, which feed on those creatures, crashed as well.
    — Joel Sartore, National Geographic, 21 Nov. 2019
  • Breese extends the smelt toward the chick, which leans forward and swallows the fish whole.
    — Melody Bentz, Smithsonian Magazine, 8 July 2021
  • Bogoslof’s seals eat squid and northern smoothtongue, a deep-water fish that looks like a smelt.
    — Washington Post, 4 Oct. 2019
  • My mother helps herself delicately to a bite of pea shoots, then the smelt.
    — Ling Ma, The New Yorker, 4 July 2022
  • Breese puts a smelt in a hole at the end of the bamboo pole and extends the fish up to a white tern perched on a branch above her head.
    — Melody Bentz, Smithsonian Magazine, 8 July 2021
  • Researchers caught fewer forage fish, such as herring, anchovy and smelt.
    — Washington Post, 17 Sep. 2017
  • Old world favorites include tripe, smelts, veal and peas, and braciola.
    — Usa Today Network, USA Today, 20 Mar. 2026
  • Old world favorites include tripe, smelts, veal and peas, and braciola.
    — The Providence Journal, 13 Mar. 2026
  • The pumps chomp up all manner of fish, including salmon and endangered tiny native smelt.
    — George Skelton, latimes.com, 12 July 2018
  • State biologists have found hardly any Delta smelt in their sampling nets in the past two years.
    — Ryan Sabalow and Dale Kasler, sacbee, 1 June 2018
  • Decades of pumping have helped pushed smelt, Chinook salmon and other fish to the brink of extinction.
    — Dale Kasler and Ryan Sabalow, sacbee, 11 Apr. 2018
  • Meanwhile, halibut in these waters have declined, and smelts – an important food for seabirds – have crashed.
    — Hal Bernton, The Seattle Times, 15 Sep. 2019
  • There was a recent first-person piece on the art of luring crafty little fish called smelts from the icy waters of Maine.
    — Liz Spayd, New York Times, 8 Apr. 2017
  • Consecutive surveys in late April and early May found no smelt at all.
    — Ryan Sabalow and Dale Kasler, sacbee, 1 June 2018
  • Subsistence fishing for the little smelt has gone on forever.
    — Alaska Dispatch News, 31 July 2017
  • Bogoslof is surrounded by deep water, and its seals eat squid and northern smoothtongue, a deep-water fish that looks like a smelt.
    — Dan Joling, San Diego Union-Tribune, 3 Oct. 2019
  • For the past two seasons, Icelanders have not been able to harvest capelin, a type of smelt, as their numbers plummeted.
    — Kendra Pierre-Louis, New York Times, 29 Nov. 2019
  • But from a practical angling perspective, tomcod, like smelt, belong to the past.
    — Capt. John McMurray, Field & Stream, 10 Feb. 2020
  • Because of this, a large number of the reservoir’s walleye population has moved away from shore to follow the smelt.
    — Terry Wickstrom, The Denver Post, 22 Feb. 2017
  • The mammals usually appeared at the Columbia's mouth to snatch smelt.
    — Craig Welch, National Geographic, 14 July 2016
  • Unusually large populations of smelt have drawn record numbers of sea lions to an area near the mouth of the river.
    — National Geographic, 14 July 2016
  • All of that may change soon, since growing evidence suggests that the Delta smelt is now effectively extinct in the wild.
    — David Owen, The New Yorker, 11 May 2022
  • The delta smelt, a finger-length fish, has been spiraling toward extinction despite decades of rescue efforts.
    — Ian Jamesstaff Writer, Los Angeles Times, 10 Sep. 2022

smelt

2 of 2 verb
  • Many patients were motionless in their beds in rooms that smelt of urine.
    — WSJ, 31 Aug. 2022
  • The former servants’ quarters smelt of lilies.
    — Carly Tagen-Dye, PEOPLE, 10 Nov. 2025
  • Most virgin steel requires a blast furnace that uses coal to smelt iron ore into iron.
    — Cameron Pugh, Christian Science Monitor, 12 May 2025
  • The pizzas will feature proteins that aren’t usually used such as pork jowl and smelt.
    — Tanay Warerkar, San Francisco Chronicle, 25 May 2021
  • In the Late Bronze Age, humans learned to smelt iron, and things haven’t been the same since.
    — Sara Kiley Watson, Popular Science, 3 Aug. 2023
  • When smelting silver, adding lead to the crushed ore helps concentrate the silver.
    — Kiona N. Smith, Ars Technica, 15 May 2018
  • But, trust me, after a while, all the coolest Neanderthals were smelting.
    — Caroline Rose Giuliani, New Yorker, 19 May 2026
  • But stopping a blast furnace in the middle of smelting molten iron used to create steel could be even riskier.
    — Adam Taylor, Washington Post, 15 June 2023
  • Others had tried smelting iron with coal, but Darby was the first to roast the coal before smelting.
    — Jonathan Schifman, Popular Mechanics, 9 July 2018
  • But smelting iron in the colonies destroyed business for the ironworks in England.
    — Jonathan Schifman, Popular Mechanics, 9 July 2018
  • Death metal and industrial get smelted in the band’s blast-furnace style.
    — John Adamian, courant.com, 11 Aug. 2019
  • Iron that comes from meteorites has a higher nickel content than iron dug up from the ground and smelted by humans.
    — Jonathan Schifman, Popular Mechanics, 9 July 2018
  • Metz said that Vista sources its copper from fabricators who buy it from the mines and smelt it into strips and ingots.
    — Aaron Smith, Forbes, 10 June 2021
  • French women smelt good, and soldiers returning from the Western Front had come to like that.
    — Matthew Sweet, The Economist, 4 Dec. 2020
  • The men have been friends since high school in South Milwaukee and first smelted together in their teens.
    — Paul A. Smith, Journal Sentinel, 2 Apr. 2023
  • The readings came from scrap metal that had already been compressed into cubes ready to be smelted on Sunday evening.
    — Ananya Bhattacharya, Quartz, 20 Mar. 2023
  • Over four years, the fire smelted an ever-purer, ever-bolder warriorhood.
    — Adam Thirlwell, The New York Review of Books, 17 June 2019
  • There, campers would smelt iron to make stakes, which volunteers would deliver to Ukrainian troops to use for building trenches.
    — Andrea Stanley, The Atlantic, 30 Aug. 2022
  • The rare mineral was used for smelting aluminum, critical for building airplanes during the war.
    — Paul Bierman, Fortune, 14 Jan. 2026
  • The bauxite mined in Guinea is shipped abroad for refining into alumina, which is in turn smelted into aluminum.
    — Rachel Chason and Chloe Sharrock, Anchorage Daily News, 27 Apr. 2023
  • Most were eventually sent to smelting factories and melted.
    — Encyclopedia Britannica, 12 Mar. 2026
  • Participants ate salad using biodegradable cutlery and drank seltzer from cans that could have been smelted from Guinean bauxite.
    — Lisa Song, ProPublica, 15 June 2023
  • Already in the ascendancy, Iran smelt blood following his dismissal.
    — Time, 25 Nov. 2022
  • The building was designed to filter pollutants produced by smelting, the melting of rocks that separates metal from its ore.
    — Martin Schiavenato, The Conversation, 30 Aug. 2023
  • The bleak camps were built in 1999 near piles of waste from a former lead-smelting factory, and residents had raised health concerns for years.
    — Austin Ramzy, New York Times, 26 May 2017
  • The free disposal process doesn’t involve smelting or crushing, but the guns rather are taken apart, with the receiver or frame being the only piece destroyed.
    — Detroit Free Press, 10 Jan. 2024
  • In breaking his own rules, the Professor sets the groundwork for some pretty huge complications that hurt his allies smelting gold in the bank.
    — Alamin Yohannes, EW.com, 29 Apr. 2020
  • Two thousand years ago, the Romans smelted precious ores in clay furnaces, extracting silver and belching lead into the sky.
    — Katie Langin, Science | AAAS, 18 May 2018
  • Rainbow smelt from Lake Superior should be consumed only once a month, the only species of fish in the lake to be impacted at this point.
    — Laura Schulte, Journal Sentinel, 7 July 2022
  • The aluminum oxide left over in the process can be recycled indefinitely, Koehler said, even re-smelted down to be used again in new canisters.
    — London Gibson, Indianapolis Star, 17 Apr. 2020

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'smelt.' 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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