If your idea of bliss is sitting on the porch or beside an open window with a cup of your favorite hot drink, enjoying a rainy day, then you’re probably a pluviophile, someone who loves rain. But before the rain begins, something happens that delights even people who aren’t so enchanted with rain itself. It’s the arrival of the scent that heralds the onset of rain.
The smell of rain is known as petrichor. The word itself is evocative. Coined in a 1964 paper published in Nature, it’s a combination of “petro,” meaning stone, and “ichor,” meaning a “tenuous essence,” so, “a tenuous essence derived from rock or stone,” according to the paper’s authors.
However, the more romantically inclined among us might go with Merriam-Webster and define ichor as something like, “the fluid that flows through the veins of the gods.”
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