smutch

English

Etymology

Perhaps an alteration of smudge, smatch, or smooch.

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /smʌt͡ʃ/

• Audio (Southern England):

  (file)

Verb

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

1. To soil, stain or smudge.
   • c. 1610–1611 (date written), William Shakespeare, “The Winters Tale”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount, published 1623, →OCLC, [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^[1], London, published 1641, act II, scene 6, page 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^[2], New York: Harper, page 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, “Invocation”, in John Brown’s Body‎^[3], New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, page 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.

2. To eat noisily, as with one's mouth open. (Can we add an example for this sense?)

Noun

smutch (plural smutches)

1. A stain, smudge or blot.
   • 1629, John Smith, “An Exposition of the Lord’s Prayer”, in Essex doue, presenting the world with a few of her oliue branches‎^[4], London: George Edwardes, page 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, 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^[5], volume 2, London: Chapman and Hall, page 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^[6]:

     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^[7], Penguin, published 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

• smut

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