Word.ws English Dictionary

bibliosmia

bibliosmia noun: the pleasant smell and aroma of a new (or any) book, caused by the gradual chemical breakdown of the compounds used within the paper.

Noun

bibliosmia (uncountable)

  1. (neologism) The pleasant smell and aroma of a new (or any) book, caused by the gradual chemical breakdown of the compounds used within the paper.
    • He [Evan Friss] approvingly considers the Instagram wall at Books Are Magic, the novelist Emma Straub’s shop in the Cobble Hill neighborhood of Brooklyn, and less so the eponymous bibliosmia fragrance bottled by Powell’s, the Portland, Ore., landmark.2024 August 4, Alexandra Jacobs, “Browsing Is a Pleasure in This History of the Bookstore”, in The New York Times

Origin of bibliosmia

From biblio- (“book”) + -osmia (“smell”). Coined on 24 February 2014 by English lecturer and author Oliver Tearle in a now-deleted tweet, originally as “the act of smelling books”.

Questions about bibliosmia

What does bibliosmia mean?
Bibliosmia means the pleasant smell and aroma of a new (or any) book, caused by the gradual chemical breakdown of the compounds used within the paper.
What part of speech is bibliosmia?
Bibliosmia is a noun.

Words near bibliosmia in the dictionary

  1. bibliopolism
  2. bibliopolist
  3. bibliopolistic
  4. bibliopolists
  5. bibliopoly
  6. bibliosmia
  7. bibliosnitch
  8. bibliosnitches
  9. bibliotaph
  10. bibliotaphic
  11. bibliotaphist

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: bibliosmia (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “bibliosmia.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/bibliosmia. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.