There's a word for that?

I came across a very interesting word in the vocabulary app that I have. Petrichor. Here is the definition, "a pleasant smell that frequently accompanies the first rain after a long period of warm, dry weather." You might call it the smell of rain. You are probably familiar with it and probably never thought about what it was. Neither did I.

Being the curious sort, I read Wikipedia's article on it. The odor originates from oils of certain plants. The oils get into the dirt and are released when it rains, more so during a light rain. The concept has been discussed in science journals since the 1800s but the word petrichor was not coined until 1964.

A final thing that surprised me is that it is in the dictionary of two different spell checkers. I remember 20 years ago when "detent", I thought a fairly well know word, was not in Word's spell checker. Score one for progress.