A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
975 entries
smellscape
The olfactory landscape navigated by anything that reads the world through chemical traces — dogs, moths, seabirds tracking plumes of dimethyl sulfide to krill blooms. The smellscape of a place is as structured and informative as its visual landscape, but humans can barely perceive it.
Etymology
Smell from Middle English smel, of uncertain origin — no secure root beyond English, though possibly related to Middle Dutch smölen (to smolder). -scape from Old English -scæpe (as in landscape), denoting an expanse taken in as a whole — here, the whole world as delivered by the nose.