Smelt vs smelled

Question

Both are past tense verbs of smell, are they interchangeable? Are there right and wrong ways to use them in sentences, examples would be much appreciated too!

user 66974 · Accepted Answer

As suggested by the Grammarist “smelled” is the  more common form in AmE, while in BrE both forms are used:

In American and Canadian English, the verb smell makes smelled in the past tense and as a past participle.
Outside North America, English speakers use smelled and smelt interchangeably, and neither form is significantly more common than the other.
For North Americans, smelt usually means (1) to melt or fuse ores, and (2) any of several small, silvery fishes of the family Osmeridae found in fresh waters of the northern hemisphere. Smelt as a form of smell is not unheard of in North America, but it is rare appearing mainly in the rhyming jocular expression whoever smelt it dealt it (and its variants).

Diana Berman · Answer

Smell has both an irregular and regular form. You can use both and both are correct. Brits use smelled and smelt interchangeably, but speakers in North America rarely use smelt.
But which is the most used one? Let's look at Google Ngram Viewer tool which displays a graph showing how phrases have occurred in a corpus of books over the years.

Let's look at the current online media:

New project to find out what Europe smelt like from 16-20th century –
[BBC]
Yaoumbaev told CNN he smelt something extremely unpleasant –[CNN]

Source: en.learniv.com

Greybeard · Answer

If we use Google Ngram Viewer to distinguish between American and British published books, we see that there was, until about 1980, a regular and historic advantage of about 50% in the frequency of smelled over smelt in both versions. However, after that date, the instances of "smelled" have soared.
The caveat is that Google Ngrams is not very good at distinguishing American English from British English, as can be see by a search for "color,favor" in British English - there should be no examples.

Smelt vs smelled

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