Someone gave the word for that wonderful smell you get when it rains after a hot dry smell and I thought "Oh, good. I'll remember that word."
Apparently not! and now I can't find it again, please help.
...when it rains after a hot dry smell...I'm sure it's a typo, but if it ain't then the result could be quite "rank".
Thanks Jackie, It's petrichor. Dr. Bill sent it in a PM as well.
yes it was just a freudian typo.
...it was just a freudian typo
as opposed, say, to a Jungian archetypo.
petrichor
Could not find it in my OED-CD But a search came up with this from Quinion :
The smell of rain on dry ground.
More specifically, it’s the pleasant smell that often accompanies the first rain after a long period of warm, dry weather in certain regions. Didn’t you always want a word for it? It was named by two Australian researchers in an article in Nature in 1964, who discovered that the smell is an oily essence that comes from rocks or soil that are often (but not always) clay-based. The oil is a complicated set of at least fifty different compounds, rather like a perfume. It turned out that the oils are given off by vegetation during dry spells and are adsorbed on to the surface of rocks and soil particles, to be released into the air again by the next rains. I can’t find any record of anybody having tried to bottle and sell it, but can’t help thinking it would be a hot item (my agent’s fee will be the usual modest 10%). The word comes from Greek petros, a stone, plus ichor, from the Greek word for the fluid that flows like blood in the veins of the gods. So the word means something like “essence of rock”. Alas, it is rarely encountered.
World Wide Words is copyright © Michael Quinion, 1996–2004.
All rights reserved. Contact the author for reproduction requests.Comments and feedback are always welcome.
Page created 2 June 2001.
Another smell I love is that of new mown hay. I missed that annual summer nasal fest when I was in Hawaii until I found that the maile leaf has the same odor. Maile is that leafy, open-end lei men are often pictured wearing.
Lovely! Now if they could bottle that! Mercy!
Neat term!
Yeah, and when honeysuckle's in bloom...mmm!