Ozone
/ˈoʊzoʊn/noun
A form of oxygen with three atoms per molecule, sharp-smelling, damaging at ground level and protective high up.
The Greek roots
Literally: “the smelling thing”
The story of the word
Christian Friedrich Schönbein named it in 1840 for the smell alone. He had noticed a sharp odour around electrical machines and near lightning strikes, and gave the unknown cause a name meaning simply smelling, years before chemists worked out it was oxygen in threes. So the layer that keeps ultraviolet off the planet is called the stinker. The Greek root also gives osmium, named in 1804 for the reek of its oxide.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → German coinage → English
- First recorded
- 1840
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
In a sentence
You can smell ozone after a strike, a metallic sweetness in the air.
Ground-level ozone is what makes the smog warnings go out in August.