Fillichor: the smell of fall

It’s fall season – my favorite time of the year! And with that, comes something that most associate with this season: the smell of leaves. So I was thinking one day, there is a word to describe the smell of rain after a hot dry summer day – petrichor. There must be a word to describe the smell of leaves that is specific to the fall season, but I couldn’t find any. So, with a little bit of spare time, and a little bit of word engineering creativity, I came up with:

fillichor (noun): the musky-sweet smell of decaying leaves in the fall.

I took my inspiration from the word petrichor, that is formed by two words: petri (Greek for rock) + ichor. So fillichor came to be in the same way: fillo (Greek for leaf) + ichor.

Happy fall season, and enjoy the fillichor if you’re out and surrounded by deciduous trees!