A facile hydrothermal route was developed for the preparation of well-aligned hierarchical flower-like NiO nanostructure with the assistance of SDS that served as a structure-directing agent as well as a capping agent in the process of aggregation and assembly. Notably, the NiO sensors exhibit enhanced gas-sensing performance towards ethanol, which could be explained in association with the ultrathin nanosheets that are close to Debye length (L-D) scale and thus get the majority carriers fully depleted due to the ionization of adsorbed oxygen, abundant effective gas diffusion paths as well as high surface-to volume ratio to promote sufficient contact and reaction between the NiO sample and ethanol molecules, and numerous miniature reaction rooms assembled with nanosheets to make the test gas molecules stay long enough for completed gas-sensing reactions. Besides, a novel growth mechanism with the passage of reaction time was also proposed in detail. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.