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say it: ri-PEL-uhnt
repellent is a noun and adjective meaning "a compound with which fabrics are treated to repel water". It carries 6 recorded senses.
serving or tending to repel
“he became rebarbative and prickly and spiteful”
“I find his obsequiousness repellent”
highly offensive; arousing aversion or disgust
“a disgusting smell”
“distasteful language”
“a loathsome disease”
“the idea of eating meat is repellent to me”
“revolting food”
“a wicked stench”
incapable of absorbing or mixing with
“a water-repellent fabric”
“plastic highly resistant to steam and water”
Forms marked · are formed by the regular rule rather than recorded in the source data. English keeps a few hundred irregulars and the rest follow the pattern, so the rule is right far more often than not — but it is a rule, and the mark says so.
Definitions, synonyms and semantic relations for repellent come from Princeton University’s WordNet. The pronunciation comes from the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary. Commonness is measured against a corpus of everyday English. Full sources and licences.