Properties of odor vocabularies in English and other languages

Because of the difficulty of putting odor experiences into words, The sense of smell is sometimes called “the muted sense” (Olofsson & Gottfried, 2015). Odors presented in isolation are extremely difficult to name (Hörberg et al. 2024), and most languages lack dedicated vocabularies for describing odor experiences (Majid 2021). When people talk about smells, they use words referring to the source of the smell (it smells like lavender), sensory metaphors (it smells sour / pungent / warm), or terms referring to subjective evaluations of the smell (it smells good / strong / cozy) (Hörberg et al. 2022). Odor vocabularies of western languages are thus fuzzy and vague, including words from other domains. At the same time, there are a few languages with well-defined odor vocabularies with words that refer to specific odor qualities independently of their sources (e.g. Majid & Burenhult 2014). In this seminar, I present results from corpus-based and data-driven studies, showing how words for odors can be identified in languages without well-defined odor vocabularies, how odor vocabularies are semantically organized, how much information about odor qualities is encoded in natural language, and, finally, how well language models capture this information (Hörberg et al. 2022; Kurfalı et al. 2025). If time permits, I will also present results from more recent elicitation-based studies, investigating how odor vocabularies differ across languages.

Hörberg, T., Kurfalı, M., Larsson, M., Jonsson Laukka, E., Herman, P., & Olofsson, J. K. (2024). A Rose by Another Name? Odor Misnaming is Associated with Linguistic Properties. Cognitive Science, 48(10), e70003. https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.70003

Hörberg, T., Larsson, M., & Olofsson, J. K. (2022). The Semantic Organization of the English Odor Vocabulary. Cognitive Science, 46(11). https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.13205

Kurfalı, M., Herman, P., Pierzchajlo, S., Olofsson, J., & Hörberg, T. (2025). Representations of smells: The next frontier for language models? Cognition, 264, 106243. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106243

Majid, A., & Burenhult, N. (2014). Odors are expressible in language, as long as you speak the right language. Cognition, 130(2), 266–270. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2013.11.004

Majid, A. (2021). Human Olfaction at the Intersection of Language, Culture, and Biology. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 25(2), 111–123. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2020.11.005

Olofsson, J. K., & Gottfried, J. A. (2015). The muted sense: Neurocognitive limitations of olfactory language. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 19(6), 314–321. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2015.04.007