Do you know that the distinctive smell of soil after the first rain has a name? It is called petrichor. The term recently became the subject of an interesting discussion after billionaire industrialist and Mahindra Group chairman Anand Mahindra shared a post on X about the origin and meaning of the word.
In his post, Mahindra said he had recently discovered that the fresh smell of the earth after rain is known as petrichor. Curious about its origins, he looked into the word’s etymology and found that it was formed from two Greek terms: “petra”, meaning stone or rock, and “ichor”, the fluid believed in Greek mythology to flow through the veins of gods instead of blood.
Explaining the meaning, Mahindra wrote that petrichor could roughly be translated as “the blood of the stones” or “the essence flowing from rocks”. However, he added that even such poetic definitions fail to capture the emotions associated with the first monsoon showers in India.
