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Meet the Word
🔊 PET-rih-kor · noun
That smell that hits you the second rain starts falling on dry pavement or dry dirt — earthy, a little sweet, unmistakable. Most people have smelled it their whole lives without knowing it had a name. It does, and the story behind that name is even better than the smell itself.
This smell has a name because two scientists sat down in 1964 and built one for it out of Greek — and got it into the journal Nature. See it used in the wild, and the one thing people always get backwards about it.
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