/riːk/
[verb] To give off a strong, unpleasant smell. It can also mean to suggest something strongly, usually something bad or dishonest, as in 'the situation reeks of corruption.'
Before it meant a bad smell, 'reek' simply meant smoke — and for centuries, a smoking chimney was a sign that a home was lived in.
The word 'reek' reaches back to the very oldest layers of the English language, descending from Old English 'rēocan', which meant not 'to stink' but simply 'to smoke' or 'to steam'. This was a perfectly neutral word, describing the visible vapour rising from a fire or a hot surface. There was nothing unpleasant about it — a house that reeked was a house with a warm hearth, a house where people lived and cooked. The connection to smell came later, slowly, as the association between smoke and the powerful, clinging odours it carries began to colour the word's meaning.
The Old English 'rēocan' and its noun form 'rēc' (meaning smoke or vapour) belong to a large and ancient Germanic family. The same root produced Middle Dutch 'roken' and Old High German 'riohhan', both meaning to smoke. The Proto-Germanic ancestor is reconstructed as '*reukan', and this connects to an even older Proto-Indo-European root '*reug-', which carried the sense of belching, vomiting, or giving something off forcefully — a vivid image of smoke being expelled from a fire. The word was, in its deepest origins, about expulsion and emission, not about pleasantness or its lack.
In Scots and northern English dialects, 'reek' held onto its original meaning of smoke for an exceptionally long time. Edinburgh was famously nicknamed 'Auld Reekie' — Old Smoky — because of the thick coal smoke that hung over the city's tenements for centuries. Even today, the nickname survives, a living fossil of the word's older sense. In these dialects, to say a chimney reeked was simply to say it was working, doing its job, keeping a family warm.
The shift toward the modern meaning — a powerful, bad smell — happened gradually through the Middle English period, roughly between the 12th and 15th centuries. As smoke was strongly associated with the smells it carried (burning meat, tallow candles, damp wood, unwashed bodies crowded around a fire), the word began to absorb those connotations. By the time Middle English settled into Early Modern English, 'reek' had tilted decisively toward unpleasant odour. The logic is very human: we name things by what we notice most about them, and what most people noticed about heavy smoke was that it made everything smell.
By the 16th and 17th centuries, writers were using 'reek' firmly in its modern sense. Shakespeare and his contemporaries employed it to describe foul emanations of all kinds, both literal and figurative. The figurative use — 'reeks of dishonesty', 'reeks of desperation' — developed naturally from this, turning a word about physical smell into a powerful tool for moral judgement. To say something 'reeks' of a quality is to say that quality is so strong, so obvious, that it is almost like a physical stench you cannot escape. The word's journey from a warm hearth fire to a symbol of corruption is, in its own way, a small history of how human experience shapes language.