After a period of warm, dry weather, when it finally rains there’s often a very distinctive smell in the air. It’s a pleasant smell. It’s a smell with its very own word: “petrichor.” The fragrance is a little bit like wet dirt, but it doesn’t occur every time it rains — the preceding dry spell is a requirement.
As it happens, the aroma of summer rain is produced when organic compounds produced by plants are floating around in the dry air and haven’t been washed out for a while. That first rain brings the compounds down to the dry ground where they mix with the rainwater and form an oily resin — and “oily resin” also describes “perfume” pretty accurately. That resin is what produces petrichor.
“Petrichor” is a recent word; it was first used in the journal Nature in 1964, by scientists studying the phenomenon. It was put together out of the Latin “petra” (stone) and the Greek “ichor” (essential fluid, or “essence”). So “petrichor” is the “essence of stone,” which in fact is not a bad way to describe that smell.
Probably as a side effect of having noses about a million times less sensitive than any self-respecting dog, we don’t have all that many words for specific smells. There are some general ones, like “reek,” “aroma,” and “bouquet,” not to mention “stench” and “scent” itself. There are more of these, and smell-related words seem to be biased in favor of words for unpleasant odors. They’re “rank,” “redolent,” “foul,” and can be called “fetor,” “stink,” “malodorous,” and “odoriferous.” Even the basic word “smell” is often used to imply fetor, as in “that homeless person on the street really smells.” But as far as words for specific aromas, there are very few.“Musk” and “patchouli” are specific-scent words, and “petrichor” of course, but those may comprise the bulk of the list. There’s a whole jargon of fragrance terms used in the perfume industry (you can google it), but people whose business is not scent generally don’t know any of them. In daily life, words for things that have an identifiable smell, like “rose” or “coffee” or “skunk” generally describe the source, not the smell itself. They’re most often used in the form smells like….
That’s a pretty lame vocabulary for a whole sensory input, when you think about it. And even worse, we reuse a lot of those words for things that don’t have anything to do with smell. The whole situation stinks.
