Nose is the part of your face that sticks out between your eyes and your mouth. You use it to breathe and to smell, whether that's the aroma of fresh cookies or the warning stink of spoiled milk. Inside your nose are tiny sensors that detect thousands of different scents, sending signals to your brain about what's in the air around you.

Your nose does more than smell, though. It warms and filters the air you breathe, trapping dust and germs in tiny hairs before they reach your lungs. When you have a cold and your nose feels stuffed up, you realize how much you rely on it for comfortable breathing.

The word also means the front end of something, like the nose of an airplane or a car. As a verb, to nose means to push or poke with your nose, like when a dog noses around in the grass to investigate smells. If you nose around in someone's business, you're being nosy or overly curious about things that don't concern you. And when someone wins a race by a nose, they win by the smallest possible margin, just barely ahead of the competition.