smutch

verb

1. To soil, stain or smudge.

   “Why, that’s my bawcock. What, hast smutch’d thy nose? They say it is a copy out of mine.”

   “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?”

   “And then in came a wee girl of seven, with dirty face and pure blue eyes and a smutched and insufficient dress.”

   “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

1. A stain, smudge or blot.

   “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.”

   “[…] 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.”

   “I could favour you with sundry touches Of the paint-smutches with which the Duchess Heightened the mellowness of her cheek’s yellowness”

   “Strether felt his character receive, for the instant, a smutch from all the wrong things he had suspected or believed.”

   “Looking out of her window, she was alerted by a smutch of bronze light glowering on this Anglo-Flemish landscape.”