English
smutch
Verb

smutch (smutches, present participle smutching; past and past participle smutched)

  1. To soil, stain or smudge.
    • circa 1610, William Shakespeare, The Winter's Tale, Act I, Scene 2,
      Why, that’s my bawcock. What, hast smutch’d thy nose?
      They say it is a copy out of mine.
    • 1616, Ben Jonson, The Devil Is an Ass, 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.
Noun

smutch (plural smutches)

  1. 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, The Task (poem), London: J. Johnson, Book 4, p. 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 London: Methuen, Chapter 12, page 174,
      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.
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