smell one's own farts

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for smell one's own farts is 21 letters long, classified as a verb. It sits outside the most-frequent rank tiers, which is often why uncommon words generate more spelling variants per reader. The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "To become conceited; to believe that one's achievements are greater than they really are.".

No misspelling variants are generated for smell one's own farts in our index, suggesting the orthography follows predictable English patterns. It is not paired with a close-neighbour confusable in our dataset, which tends to mean the word is visually distinctive enough to stand on its own.

Etymologically, the entry records: Named after the fact that one is liable to become acclimatized to, or even come to like, the smell of one's own farts, whilst still recognizing others' as foul. The acclimatization is likened to becoming out-of-touch with the reality of one's mediocrity. Root origin matters for spelling because borrowed morphemes (Greek, Latin, Old French, Old English) carry their source-language orthographic conventions into modern English, which is why historical etymology is often the cleanest predictor of whether a cluster like "-ough", "-eau", or "-tion" will appear. For readers arriving here from a spelling check, the authoritative guidance is: the correct English form is smell one's own farts, spelled S-M-E-L-L- -O-N-E-'-S- -O-W-N- -F-A-R-T-S, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.