smutch

English

Etymology

Perhaps an alteration of smudge, smatch, or smooch.

Pronunciation

IPA^(key): /smʌt͡ʃ/
Audio (Berkshire, UK) (file)

Verb

smutch (third-person singular simple present smutches, present participle smutching, simple past and past participle smutched)

To soil, stain or smudge.
- c. 1610–1611 (date written), William Shakespeare, “The VVinters Tale”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount, published 1623, OCLC 606515358, [Act I, scene ii]:
  Why, that’s my bawcock. What, hast smutch’d thy nose?
  They say it is a copy out of mine.
- 1616, Ben Jonson, The Divell is an Asse, London, 1641, Act II, Scene 6, p. 26,
  Have you seene but a bright Lilly grow,
  Before rude hands have touch’d it?
  Have you mark’d but the fall of Snow,
  Before the soyle hath smutch’d it?
- 1909, O. Henry, “Supply and Demand” in Options, New York: Harper, p. 126,
  And then in came a wee girl of seven, with dirty face and pure blue eyes and a smutched and insufficient dress.
- 1928, Stephen Vincent Benét, John Brown’s Body, New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, “Invocation,” p. 7,
  Receive them all—and should you choose to touch them
  With one slant ray of quick, American light,
  Even the dust will have no power to smutch them,
  Even the worst will glitter in the night.
To eat noisily, as with one's mouth open. (Can we add an example for this sense?)

Noun

smutch (plural smutches)

A stain, smudge or blot.
- 1629, John Smith, Essex doue, presenting the world with a few of her oliue branches, London: George Edwardes, “An Exposition of the Lord’s Prayer,” p. 124,
  As let a man sticke a Candle to a stone wall, though the Candle do not burne through it, yet it will leaue a shrewd smutch behind it, soyling the wall, so as it will not easily be wyped out. Thus it is with tentations, though they doe not all the mischiefe they would and might doe, they will yet be sure to leaue an impression of filth and staines behinde them.
- 1785, William Cowper, “Book IV. The Winter Evening.”, in The Task, a Poem, […], London: […] J[oseph] Johnson; […], OCLC 228757725, page 168:
  […] Examine well
  His milk-white hand. The palm is hardly clean—
  But here and there an ugly smutch appears.
  Foh! ’twas a bribe that left it.
- 1849, Robert Browning, “The Flight of the Duchess” in Poems, London: Chapman and Hall, Volume 2, p. 390,
  I could favour you with sundry touches
  Of the paint-smutches with which the Duchess
  Heightened the mellowness of her cheek’s yellowness
- 1903, Henry James, The Ambassadors‎:
  Strether felt his character receive, for the instant, a smutch from all the wrong things he had suspected or believed.
- 1979, Patrick White, The Twyborn Affair, Penguin, 1981, Part 3, p. 411,
  Looking out of her window, she was alerted by a smutch of bronze light glowering on this Anglo-Flemish landscape.

Related terms

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