- Imagine the smell that lingers in the air after a big rainstorm.

(upbeat music) How do you describe it?

Earthy, kind of musky, maybe just like rain?

You know the smell, but can you put it into words?

With sight, it's easy to categor Bananas are yellow, stop signs are red, windows are translucent.

But when it comes to smell, our vocabularies falter.

Besides a handful of words, it's hard to describe a scent without using analogy, "It smells like cinnamon!"

Or, "It's kind of fishy!"

Take a second.

How many ways can you describe a without referring to the source?

I'll wait.

(clock ticking) (alarm buzzing) That scarcity of words is a semantic issue, not a sensory one.

We have hundreds of olfactory receptors in our noses and can differentiate as man as a trillion different odors, and yet, there are so few catego for all those fragrances.

Historically, lots of peopl thought that our sense of smell wasn't all that important, perhaps because we don't have that many words for it and aren't that great at naming Immanuel Kant considered it to be the, "Most ungrateful," and, "Most dispensable," of our five senses.

Charles Darwin said it's, "Of extremely slight service," and philosopher P.F.

Strawson deemed the sense, "Strikingly more trivial than th And recent studies have shown that a quarter of college studen would rather have their phones than their sense of smell.

But those are all people from the Western world, and by now we should know that you can't generalize about the whole world based on a few languages and cul You smell what I'm cooking?

I'm Dr.

Erica Brozovsky, and this is "Otherwords."

(upbeat music) - [Announcer] "Otherwords."

(upbeat music continues) - While our eyes only hav three types of color receptors: red, blue and green, we can reliably categorize thing into several abstract basic colo with high consensus among speake In other words, we have high cod when it comes to colors.

Codability is a measure of how e quickly and consensually speakers of a language can name a concept.

High codability indicates a commonly agreed upon name, whereas low codability suggests, well, the opposite.

When it comes to pitch, we have clear categories too, though the words differ between In English, I think of high vers In Farsi, Turkish and Zapotec, the corresponding pitches are thin and thick.

For the Kreung of Cambodia, it's tight versus loose, and for the Kpelle of Liberia, light versus heavy.

My personal favorite is one of t the Shona of Zimbabwe describe pitch on the mbira, crocodile, low, versus thos who to follow crocodile, high.

But is scent ineffable?

Is it really unable to be put in For linguists, the study of olfaction and olfactory language examines how different languages lexicalize their perception of odor, how speakers describe smells in experimental tasks, and how the patterns relate to c or semantic systems more broadly Essentially, what do people say about smells and how do they say it?

In English and many other Western languages, descriptions of smells are reliant on source-based expressions and evaluations.

Experimental studies have shown that English and Dutch speakers will often identify an odor by naming its presumed source, such as, "Banana," "Garlic," "Cinnamon," or resorting to vague labels lik "Disgusting," or even, "Weird," rather than specific olfactory descriptors.

You and I might agree tha something smells like the beach or smells like a hospital, but that's really just a shortcu for a bunch of associations, salt, fish, tanginess and sunscr versus disinfectant, plastic, anxiety and sterile air.

Interestingly, while we don't ha a large fragrance vocabulary in odor still manages to pop up occ in everyday speech.

There are lots of smell-based metaphors and idioms.

Follow your nose.

Something smells fishy.

Eh, I'll sniff around.

I smell a rat!

That stinks.

Wake up and smell the coffee, or stop and smell the roses.

I wonder why.

Maybe it's because even though we can't see odor, we can definitely sense it so it can serve as an effective for hidden problems or motives or even subtle changes in atmosp While I may struggle to describe scents in English, there are a number of languages around the world where scents are as easily descr and categorizable as colors.

Linguists Asifa Majid and Niclas conducted olfactory studies with the Jahai, a group of indigenous hunter-gat who live in the rainforest of the Malay Peninsula.

They found that Jahai has a dozen general terms that capture the different qualities of smell.

Much like we use the word yellow to describe the color of bananas and sunflowers, the Jahai used one word hat for the smells associated with rotten meat, feces, burnt hair, lighter gas and shrimp paste among other things, or cs for gasoline, smoke and or pus for the smell common to old dwellings, cooked cabbage and stale food.

Sure, they're all stinky with my limited English odor voc but to the Jahai, there's a lot of nuance in there.

Now, how do linguists study some so ephemeral as a smell?

One common method is fiel work using standardized odors.

Participants are given scents often in the form of a pen, imagine one with a scent instead of with ink, and asked to identify, describe or rate the odor.

Researchers measure variables like reaction time, agreement across speakers and how they're described, whether with a source label or an abstract descriptive term.

Observed patterns can indicate how strongly or weakly olfactory categories are convent in a speech community.

In a study that compared speakers of Jahai and Dutch, the Jahai participants collectiv 22 responses to the scents, while the Dutch participants cam with 707 different responses to the same scents.

Clearly the Jahai were on the sa while the Dutch didn't really have collective agreement when it came to the odors.

The Jahai speakers were also muc and more succinct in their respo In other words, the Jahai speake had high lexical codability for and for the Dutch, it's low.

Other studies of the Aslian lang of the Malay Peninsula, including Maniq, Semaq Beri and showed similarly rich dedicated olfactory lexicons.

Semelai was particularly nuanced with 24 different abstract odor ranging from the balsamic odors of flowers and resins to the wafting odor of large, strong-smelling fruits like durian and jackfruit, and the difference between urine and other similar ammonia-like o and the smell of concentrated st Odor serves as a culturally relevant sensory channel for communicating everyday life.

This is not exclusive to the Aslian languages, nor to the Malay Peninsula.

In Mexico, researchers have foun that Huehuetla Tepehua has 4 different olfactory idiophones or words that depict sensory imagery or experiences.

Cha'palaa spoken by the Chachi people in northern Ecuador has 15 basic smell terms.

And most excitingly, to a linguist at least, is that the abstract smell terms are all formed with a morpheme, which means that smells are in their own grammatical cat There is some suggestion that co that rely heavily on olfactory c for things like foraging or navigating or ritual might have more odor words and talk about smell more often.

But to be clear, this is not just a hunter-gatherer thing.

Thai with tens of millions of sp also has a rich vocabulary of words for odors, and the Onge of the Andaman Isla greet each other with, "How is y So when psychologist Howard Gardner declared that, "A keen olfactory sense has little special value across he was clearly mistaken."

Corpus-based olfactory studies look at how smell-related terms are used in corpora of spoken or written material.

Researchers can see what emotion or situations show up in relation to specific words like miasmic, aromatic, stinky or fragrant.

They might find, for example, that certain words have a strong association with danger or nostalgia or luxu or that there's a specialized vo for sommeliers and perfumers that the average person would be unlikely to use when encountering a scent.

There are some areas where people try to push olfactory language further.

Think with wine tasting, "Hmm, yes, in this tempranillo, I sense notes of cherry, leather and tobacco," Or coffee, "This bean's got a bright acidity, floral aroma, chocolatey finish.

Perfume, "The sharp greenery of features a camphoraceous spice underneath a strong creaminess."

In these communities, people are deliberately practicing naming fragrances, comparing them and inventing or refining terminology.

Over time, it creates a more detailed shared vocabulary within that niche.

But interestingly, studies have that those linguistic skills don't translate into other domai One experts are no better than regular people at describing the nuances of coffee or other smells.

Low codability, if you will.

Once in a while, we'll get on the same page about a specific smell.

Remember the smell in the air after a big rainstorm?

There's actually a word for it, It was coined in 1964 by Australian scientists Isabel Joy Bear and Richard Grenfell Thomas from the ancient Greek petra for and ichor for blood of the Gods.

And the word made its way into more popular usage after being prominently featured in a 2011 episode of "Dr.

Who."

- Petrichor.

- Petrichor.

- Petrichor, petrichor.

- If you think about it, odors are a sign in olfactory co So developing olfactory language might just help us better unders what was under our noses all alo