12 Lovely and Unusual Words for the Natural World

Definition: a distinctive, earthy, usually pleasant odor that is associated with rainfall especially when following a warm, dry period and that arises from a combination of volatile plant oils and geosmin released from the soil into the air and by ozone carried by downdrafts

Petrichor was coined by Australian scientists Isabel (Joy) Bear and Richard Thomas. Its first known print appearance is in Bear and Thomas’s article “Nature of Argillaceous Odour,” published in the March 7, 1964 issue of the journal Nature (and residing now firmly behind a paywall). In Howard Poynton’s discussion of the article in The Conversation, the author describes how Bear and Thomas discovered a yellowish oil that was trapped in rocks and soil exposed to warm, dry conditions, and that when released was responsible for the smell; Poynton quotes from their article: “The diverse nature of the host materials has led us to propose the name ‘petrichor’ for this apparently unique odour which can be regarded as an ‘ichor’ or ‘tenuous essence’ derived from rock or stone.” Poynton reports that Bear and Thomas also use the word petrichor to refer to the oil itself.

Example:

She joined us at noon, smelling pleasingly like petrichor, appearing more collected, or sturdier, at least; her ribbed brown dress that hit just below the knee even seemed to fit her better, as if it issued from her instead of merely overhanging her, although its ballerina neckline continued to emphasize the absence of her grandfather’s black magic ring.
— Jennifer Croft, The Extinction of Irena Rey: A Novel, 2024

Definition: a deep sinkhole in limestone with a pool at the bottom that is found especially in Yucatán

Cenote (pronounced /sih-NOH-tee/) comes from Mexican Spanish, which in turn borrowed it from the Yucatec word ts'onot. The major source of water in modern and ancient Yucatán, cenotes are formed when a limestone surface collapses, exposing water underneath.

Example:

My calf was still smarting as I stood on the platform above a cenote at the Indigenous Eyes Ecological Reserve and contemplated jumping into the turquoise water 10 feet below, the blue punctuated by the huge amber-colored boulders covering the floor of the lagoon.
— Mya Guarnieri, The New York Times, 15 Jan. 2024

Definition: stunted forest characteristic of timberline

Krummholz comes from German, a combination of krumm, meaning “crooked,” and Holz, meaning “wood.” It refers to a forest of vegetation usually encountered near the upper limit of tree growth in mountains or high latitudes, which often grows “crooked” and low to the ground due to exposure to freezing winds.

Example:

As hikers approach tree line, they may consider the option of coming down this trail instead. The trail will continue out of the forest and onto the tundra where the open landscape of krummholz trees, kettle ponds and lush meadows beckon for many rest stops.
— Dawn Wilson, The Estes Park (Colorado) Trail-Gazette, 15 Aug. 2025

Definition: the vocal organ of birds that is a special modification of the lower part of the trachea or of the bronchi or of both

If you, like many, look forward to the dawn chorus, or if you thrill to the trills of birds at any time of day, you’ve got syrinxes to thank. Sound vibrations in the tracheal air column are evidently initiated and modulated by the vibrating membranes, specialized parts of the bronchial or tracheal walls. Songbirds, and probably other birds, are able to control the right and left halves of the syrinx separately, thus singing with two independent voices. The word syrinx comes ultimately from the Greek word for the panpipe.

Here I want to highlight three species of specialized songbirds that inhabit our lowlands: fields, pastures, wooded edges, and even residential areas with shrubby vegetation. They are all members of the family Mimidae: the northern mockingbird, gray catbird and brown thrasher. This family of songbirds all have a superior vocal apparatus called the syrinx, as Mary Morrison explained in a Bird Lore article a couple years ago. And their syrinx structure, at the juncture of the trachea and two bronchii, is capable of making different sounds from vibrations near the two bronchii independently. Their long and varied songs function to attract mates (females make choices based on male song complexity among other factors) as well as defend territory from rival males. A key difference from other songbirds is their ability to mimic the sounds they hear in their environment, often those of other birds.
— Robert Ross, The News-Item (Shamokin, Pennsylvania), 2 May 2025

Definition: a dense winter fog containing frozen particles that is formed in deep mountain valleys of the western U.S.

In the mountains of the western United States, the fog condenses into tiny, biting ice particles in extremely cold weather. English-speaking settlers who encountered this phenomenon in the 1800s needed a word for it, and ended up altering the Shoshone word paγɨnappɨh, meaning “cloud,” for this purpose.

Example:

Pogonip glistens in the sun on Monday morning along Genoa Lane as clouds cling to Jobs Peak.
— (photo caption), The Record-Courier (Gardnerville, Nevada), 29 Jan. 2025

Definition: a sphagnum bog of northern North America often with tussocks, or a usually thick deposit of partially decayed vegetable matter of wet boreal regions

English is replete with words for wetlands—land or areas that are covered often intermittently with shallow water or have soil saturated with moisture, from fen to swamp to marsh. Muskeg, which comes from the Cree word maske·k, can a synonym of bog, referring to any poorly drained, usually acid area rich in accumulated plant material, frequently surrounding a body of open water, and having a characteristic flora such as sedges, heaths, and sphagnum, but is used especially for bogs of the region and character mentioned in the above definition.

Example:

Dale’s work as a Baptist missionary took him to Thompson, Manitoba, where he served for pretty much his whole career. Before he had a church building there he held services out of his house. Thompson is a nickel mining town at the end of the paved road going north, and he ministered in town and to the Cree villages farther out over muskeg and tundra. He was popular in those villages even though he could only reach some of them in winter, when he’d drive his station wagon over ice roads marked by pieces of pine tree.
— Dean Kuipers, The Deer Camp: A Memoir of a Father, A Family, and the Land That Healed Them, 2019

Definition: a violent dust storm or sandstorm especially of Sudan

Coming from the Arabic word habūb, meaning “violent storm,” haboob refers in English to a violent dust storm or sandstorm. The word originally applied to such storms in Sudan, but has since expanded to cover similar storms in other desert regions.

Examples:

On 5th last year the Nile burst its banks and flooded Khartoum. On August 5th this year the skies over the capital darkened and then turned red, stained by one of the dust-storms, or haboobs, that often come before rain.
— The Economist, 16 Sept. 1989

Spotters reported a haboob, a kind of dust storm generated by sinking air from a thunderstorm, near the California-Nevada border, according to the weather service’s Las Vegas office.
— Hayley Smith et al., The Los Angeles Times, 15 Feb. 2022

Definition: a long narrow ridge or mound of sand, gravel, and boulders deposited by a stream flowing on, within, or beneath a stagnant glacier

Eskers are long, narrow, winding ridges (the word comes from the Irish eiscir, meaning “ridge”) composed of stratified sand and gravel deposited by a subglacial or englacial meltwater stream. Eskers may range from 16 to 160 feet (5 to 50 m) in height, from 160 to 1,600 feet (500 m) in width, and a few hundred feet to tens of miles in length. They may occur unbroken or as detached segments. Notable areas of eskers are found in Maine, U.S.; Canada; Ireland; and Sweden.

Example:

“This would be a good place for a golf course,” Anita remarked, and scarcely had she uttered the words than—after driving two thousand yards on down the road with a dogleg to the left—we were running parallel to the fairways of a somnolent St. Andrews, beyond reach of the sea wind, with natural bunkers and traps of glacial sand, with hummocky roughs and undulating fairways, with kettle depressions, kettle lakes, and other chaotic hazards. … “Gold was invented on the moraines, the eskers, the pitted outwash plains—the glacial topography—of Scotland,” she explained.
— John McPhee, In Suspect Terrain, 1983

Definition: a water passage where the tide meets a river current; especially : an arm of the sea at the lower end of a river

Estuaries are places where rivers meet the sea and may be defined as areas where salt water is measurably diluted with fresh water. On average, estuaries are biologically more productive than either the adjacent river or the sea, because they have a special kind of water circulation that traps plant nutrients. Many coastal features designated by other names are in fact estuaries (for instance, Chesapeake Bay). Estuary comes from the Latin aestuarium, in turn from aestus, meaning “boiling, tide.”

Example:

From kayak level, it looks like any tidal estuary. Brown’s River zigzags toward the mainland, as tidal creeks habitually do. All around us are marsh islands, hardly distinguishable from Corn, Cross, and Dilly Islands in the Essex River Basin. “I think that might be Hunt’s Island,” I call out to Robert.
— Patricia Hanlon, Swimming to the Top of the Tide: Finding Life Where Land and Water Meet, 2021

Definition: granular snow pellets

Graupel, which is sometimes also referred to as soft hail, comes to English from German, in which language it is the diminutive of the word for “pearl barley” (Graupe). The word’s first-known use in English occurred in the late 1800s, when meteorologists decided that there was a need to distinguish between different kinds of hail.

Example:

Early Tuesday morning, commuters were welcomed to the day by hail and graupel falling throughout Northeast Ohio, which caused a multi-car crash on Interstate 71 near Linndale. Most of what was seen in the region was graupel, which is often smaller and crunchier and an opaque white color, around the size of Dippin’ Dots ice cream, said Patrick Saunders a meteorologist with the weather service. “When you step on graupel, there is a little crunch to it,” Saunders said. “Hail is a little more solid and clearer. But both occur in environments supportive of thunderstorms.”
— Zachary Smith, The Plain Dealer (Cleveland, Ohio), 16 Oct. 2024

Definition: basaltic lava having a smooth, often billowy, shiny surface

Pahoehoe is a borrowing of the Hawaiian pāhoehoe. Pahoehoe lava flows are characterized by smooth, gently undulating, or broadly hummocky surfaces. The liquid lava flowing beneath a thin, still-plastic crust drags and wrinkles it into tapestry-like folds and rolls resembling twisted rope. Pahoehoe lava flows are fed almost wholly internally by streams of liquid lava flowing beneath a solidified or partly solidified surface. Typically, the margin of a pahoehoe flow advances by protruding one small toe or lobe after another. A’a (or aa), another borrowing from Hawaiian, this time from 'a'ā, refers to basaltic lava with a broken, rough surface; a’a can result from the same eruption of lava as pahoehoe depending on a variety of factors.

Example:

… [Hawaiian Volcano Observatory geologist, Frank] Trusdell also noted that three previous historical Mauna Loa lava flows had transitioned from producing 'a'a lava—the chunkier, more viscous lava that has characterized the current eruption—to producing more fluid pahoehoe lava. This transition, he said, also corresponded with a decrease in effusion rates, suggesting that the current slowdown might herald a new phase in the eruption.
— Michael Brestovansky, West Hawaii Today, 9 Dec. 2022