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PlainSpell

purell

noun

purell is a noun meaning “alcohol-based hand sanitizer gel” (English Wiktionary, September 2026). It is spelled P-U-R-E-L-L, and it appears about once in every 15 million words in written English (wordfreq, 2021 data).

What does purell mean?

noun

  1. 1

    slangalcohol-based hand sanitizer gel.

noun

as Purell
  1. 1

    Alternative letter-case form of purell (any alcohol-based hand sanitizer)

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).

How do you pronounce purell?

  • Australia

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Recordings: En-au-purell.ogg, Wikimedia Commons (author and licence on each file's page).

How common is purell?

Purell appears about once in every 15 million words in written English, the 115,751st most frequent word form in the list.

Source: written frequency: wordfreq 3.1 (a 2021 snapshot of Wikipedia, subtitles, news, books, web text and social media).

Where does purell come from?

Trademark genericization, from the brand name Purell.

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).