smelt
1 Americanverb (used with object)
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to fuse or melt (ore) in order to separate the metal contained.
-
to obtain or refine (metal) in this way.
noun
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smelt,
plural
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smelts
plural
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any of various small, silvery food fishes of the family Osmeridae, of cold northern waters, as the North American rainbow smelt, Osmerus mordax.
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any of several superficially similar but unrelated fishes, especially certain silversides, of California.
verb
noun
verb
verb
Other Word Forms
Noun Inflected Forms
Etymology
Origin of smelt1
First recorded in 1535–45; probably from Middle Dutch or Middle Low German smelten; cognate with German schmelzen “to melt, smelt, fuse”; see origin at melt 1,
Origin of smelt2
First recorded before 900; Middle English smelt(e), smelth, Old English smelt, smylt; compare Norwegian smelta “whiting”
Explanation
No, this verb doesn't involve using your nose. When you smelt metal, you remove it from ore, or rock. Heat is required to smelt iron. Smelt looks a lot like melt and that is an easy way to remember what this process involves. To smelt metal, you have to heat the rock, which is called ore, until the metal inside it melts or liquefies. That metal is the part that has use and value, but hard work is needed to extract it.
Vocabulary lists containing smelt
Gold Rush: Mining and Metals
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Russia - Middle School and High School
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Natural Resources and the Environment - Introductory
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Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
Look no further than GameStop’s $56 billion bid for eBay, which is the equivalent of a smelt swallowing a whale.
From The Wall Street Journal ● May 4, 2026
"We spent around an hour getting all the glass out and the porch smelt a bit, but you can imagine."
From BBC ● Dec. 19, 2025
Populations of Chinook salmon, steelhead trout, Delta smelt and other species have been declining.
From Los Angeles Times ● Dec. 15, 2025
In my family, everyone new to the table — new partners, neighbors, friends — must try a smelt.
From Salon ● Dec. 14, 2025
They didn’t dare risk the salmon cakes; the bear would have smelt them from many daywalks away.
From "Wolf Brother" by Michelle Paver
I used to avoid the old-school dishes – baccala, smelts, anchovies.
From Salon ● Dec. 14, 2025
"I don't think it would have happened from any area other than Aston with all of those foundries and factories and the smelts and the bomb sites," he adds.
From BBC ● Jul. 2, 2025
There was a recent first-person piece on the art of luring crafty little fish called smelts from the icy waters of Maine.
From New York Times ● Apr. 8, 2017
Laborers — partly fleeing potato famines in Scotland and Ireland — arrived in search of sustaining work in the flourishing iron smelts, coal and shipbuilding yards and textile factories.
From Los Angeles Times ● Mar. 21, 2015
Split the smelts down the back and remove the bone.
From The Century Cook Book by Mary Ronald
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
