/ˈoʊzoʊn/
[noun] A form of oxygen with three atoms in each molecule instead of the usual two, found in the upper atmosphere where it protects the Earth from harmful sun rays, and also produced near the ground by electrical sparks or lightning.
Ozone was named after the Greek word for 'to smell' — scientists literally called it 'the stinky gas.'
The story of ozone begins not in a laboratory but in the ancient Greek verb ozein, meaning 'to smell' or 'to have a strong odour.' This verb was itself rooted in the Proto-Indo-European base *od-, which carried the same basic sense of smelling, and which also gave Greek its word osmē, meaning 'smell' or 'odour.' For thousands of years, ozein simply described the act of giving off a scent — pleasant or otherwise — with no connection to chemistry whatsoever.
The word only leapt into science in 1840, when the Swiss-German chemist Christian Friedrich Schönbein was experimenting with electrolysis at the University of Basel. He noticed a sharp, distinctive smell near the electrodes whenever electricity passed through water, and he correctly deduced that he was detecting a previously unnamed substance. Schönbein coined the name ozon in German, drawing directly from the Greek ozein, because the gas had such a powerful and unusual odour. He presented his findings to the Natural History Society of Basel in January 1840, and the word entered scientific literature almost immediately.
From German ozon, the word passed into English as ozone within just a year or two, appearing in scientific journals and chemistry texts by the early 1840s. English borrowed it without modification because scientific terminology in the nineteenth century flowed freely across European languages, especially from German, which dominated chemistry at the time. The transition was effortless — English speakers simply adopted the German form, which itself wore its Greek ancestry on its sleeve.
For much of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, ozone was associated in the popular imagination with fresh, healthy air — particularly the bracing sea air of coastal resorts or the sharp smell after a thunderstorm. Victorians believed that ozone in seaside air was beneficial, and advertisements for coastal holidays promised the healing powers of the 'ozone.' This belief was partly correct — lightning does produce ozone — but the concentration near the beach is nowhere near as significant as people once thought. The word carried romantic and healthful connotations that have only partly survived to the present day.
The meaning of ozone expanded dramatically in the twentieth century when scientists discovered the ozone layer — a region of the stratosphere roughly 15 to 35 kilometres above the Earth's surface where ozone molecules are highly concentrated and absorb most of the Sun's harmful ultraviolet radiation. The discovery in the 1970s and 1980s that human-made chemicals called chlorofluorocarbons were destroying this layer transformed ozone from a pleasant-smelling scientific curiosity into one of the most politically charged words in environmental history. The 'ozone hole' became a symbol of environmental crisis, and the word gained a gravity and urgency that poor Schönbein, sniffing his electrodes in Basel, could never have imagined.
The ancient Greek family of words rooted in ozein has other, quieter relatives in English as well. The word osmium — the name of the heaviest naturally occurring element — was coined in 1803 by British chemist Smithson Tennant from Greek osmē (smell), because the element's oxide produced a strong, unpleasant odour. Similarly, the medical term anosmia, meaning the inability to smell, travels the path Greek a- (without) + osmē (smell) → Modern Latin anosmia → English anosmia. All of these words, from the clinical anosmia to the environmental ozone, descend from the same ancient recognition that smell is one of the most immediate and powerful of human experiences.