Petrichor (noun) is the smell given off by the first rain after a long dry spell.
I apologize once more for my calligraphy. That c is rather lopsided and it throws off the whole word. Ah, to err is human.
Anyway... petrichor. This harkens back to last season of Doctor Who, the episode written by Mr. Gaiman entitled "The Doctor's Wife." Petrichor was part of the psychic door code on the TARDIS. In order to open the door to one of the old control rooms, Amy must think of "the smell of dust after rain." This is why I love Doctor Who. And Mr. Gaiman's poetry-in-prose.
Oxford Dictionaries says this is a rather new construction from the 1960s. Petro, meaning rock. I gave it to a background character in my recent novel - back ground as in, he lived five hundred years before the characters did, but he founded an important abbey and he needed a last name, and petrichor for some reason was on the tip of my tongue. No matter how old the word actually is, is a marriage of science with poetry. I can't say why I'm drawn to words like petrichor and downwelling, except that perhaps these words point to simple but vivid descriptions of things that I would other wise find trouble putting into words. They're also mysterious. Did the scientist (I'm only assuming it was a scientist) who invented this word realize how it rolls off the tongue? Perhaps he didn't know, but that leaves the door open for us. Not to reinvent meaning, but to add dimensions and colours and shadows to it. The smell of dust after rain could very easily become some legendary person's name, the name of a ship at sea or a new shade of blue. The possibilities are endless.
