Dear Tom,
"Smog" is a strange-sounding weather word. What is its derivation?
---James Harris
Dear James,
It's an interesting story. Physician Harold Des Voeux in London coined the word in 1905 to describe natural fog contaminated by smoke: SMoke + fOG yielded SMOG. By the early 1900s, the Industrial Revolution had been in progress in England for a century, and London's naturally moist and foggy air had grown smoky and sooty from industrial pollution and widespread burning of coal. More recently, smog has come to be applied to visible, unhealthy, largely urban air pollution with or without fog as a constituent. All smog contains carbon monoxide, but photochemical smog results mainly from sunlight acting on automobile exhaust and sulfuric smog comes from the burning of sulfur-laced oil and coal.
"Smog" is a strange-sounding weather word. What is its derivation?
---James Harris
Dear James,
It's an interesting story. Physician Harold Des Voeux in London coined the word in 1905 to describe natural fog contaminated by smoke: SMoke + fOG yielded SMOG. By the early 1900s, the Industrial Revolution had been in progress in England for a century, and London's naturally moist and foggy air had grown smoky and sooty from industrial pollution and widespread burning of coal. More recently, smog has come to be applied to visible, unhealthy, largely urban air pollution with or without fog as a constituent. All smog contains carbon monoxide, but photochemical smog results mainly from sunlight acting on automobile exhaust and sulfuric smog comes from the burning of sulfur-laced oil and coal.
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