Improve your Vocabulary: 50 adjectives to describe what you see, hear, feel, smell, and taste

You have five senses: hearing, sight, smell, taste, and touch. You need a wide vocabulary to be able to accurately describe what you feel through your senses. For example, not all smells are the same. Do you know the difference between "fresh", "fragrant", "pungent", and "musty"? Watch on because in this lesson, I will teach you 50 (!) words to describe not only odours, but what you experience through all five of your senses. There will be ten words for each sense, all of which will help your conversation become more interesting to your listener, as they will be able to imagine your words more clearly and more vividly.

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TRANSCRIPT

Hi there. Welcome back to engVid with me, Benjamin. In today's lesson you are going to learn or revise 50 fantastic words that will help bring your language to life. Yes, we are going to be describing through the senses, so this will just make your language and your conversation more dynamic, more interesting as your listener starts to imagine your words more clearly.

We're going to start off with the sense of smell, sometimes called the olfactory sense. How can I talk about it? You could use a phrase such as: "The smell of..." Okay? "The smell of something was..." The smell was terrible, disgusting, fantastic, duh-duh-duh. "It smelt of..." What did it remind you of? "It smelt of old fish", "It smelt like a kebab shop", I don't know. Let's look at some adjectives that you could use connected with smell. "Acrid", okay? Meaning bitter. "Had an acrid smell." Okay? So this is quite an unusual word, here. Okay, think sort of lemons, things like that, but even more powerful. "A pungent smell". "Pungent", probably not going to be used in a good way. A pungent smell is one that sort of takes you by surprise in a quite unpleasant manner. "Foul", again, a word that is going to suggest a bad smell. A foul, a disgusting smell. "A foul stench." That's another good word to use. So, "a stench" is a really strong smell. "Fragrant". You can probably spot the word "fragrance", so this is, you know, aftershave, perfumed, they are all fragrances. "Fragrant", there, the adjective. This is more pleasant. This is a nice smell. "A fragrant smell of summer flowers." Okay? It's quite innocent. "Fresh", so we're thinking straight out the shower, a fresh smell. This is something that goes: "Oo, yes, I feel alive and awake." And awake. "This fresh smell makes me feel like I'm walking through fields." Okay? It's one that sort of wakes you up. "Musty", quite the opposite with musty. This is to do with mould. So it's something that's been lying in a cupboard for a very long time, maybe it's got holes in because it's been eaten by moths. Yes? A very old, musty smell. "Noxious", now, this is often connected with chemicals, so it's a smell that you don't want to smell because you know that maybe it's a pollutant, it's quite dangerous. "A noxious smell". "Rancid", great word, "rancid", again, meaning disgusting. Horrifically awful smell. "Sharp", quite similar to this word "acrid" here, a sharp smell, it's one that... It's not particularly nice, but it catches you by surprise. And then a "sweet" smell is one that's nice. "Mmm, the sweet smell of momma's home cooking."

Okay, on to sound. The clash of drums-dee-dee-dee-dee-can't stop thinking of Joseph and his... The Amazing Technicoloured Dreamcoat. Technicolour Dreamcoat, so that's going to be to do with sight, isn't it? More of that in a moment. Sound, how do we talk about sound? "The sound of the trumpet", "It sounded like a full choir in good voice." Right. "Blare", so this is like a... Kind of a wall of sound. "The blare of traffic made the man feel sad." Yeah. "The blare of traffic", the blare, so as I said, like a wall of sound. "Chime", we think of bells, chiming. Church bells chiming, kind of ringing. "Chirp", this is a sound that perhaps a bird would make. Chirping away. "Chirp. Chirp. Chirp. Chirp". "Chuckle", this is to do with laughter. "The chuckle of laughter", "The chuckle after the joke lasted a long time", "He chuckled." So, there it's a noun: "a chuckle", but you can also use it as a verb: "to chuckle". "Clash", we're thinking of drums, here. "The clash of the drum." Okay? We imagine that hi-hat going: "Ptch". "A clash of drums", okay? But also you can use this word to mean to fall out with someone, to argue. If you clash personalities it means they... You know, you don't get along well with someone. "Crunch", I think of food with this word. "The crunch of crisp toast", "He crunched into his breakfast cereal." Or maybe you're walking on gravel: "The crunch of gravel underneath him." So it's sort of a... Imagine things sort of going together. "Crunch, crunch." Okay? "Howl", maybe a dog or a wolf is going: "Owwww." Okay? So it's slightly onomatopoeic; the sound and the meaning are quite close together. […]