Also 7 smyrch. [f. next.]
1. A dirty mark or smear; a stain; a smudge; also, that which smirches or dirties.
a. 1688. Bunyan, Saints’ Privilege & Profit, Wks. 1855, I. 647. That men might see their smyrches when they came to wash. Ibid. (a. 1688), Water of Life (1838), 430. Crystal … is without those spots and streaks and smirches that are in other precious stones.
1850. Allingham, Poems, Wayside Well, viii. Sheltered cool and free from smirch In thy cavelet shady.
1863. J. Thomson, Sunday at Hampstead, I. v. Away from the smoke and the smirch.
1891. Conan Doyle, White Company, iv. 30. The fellow was but a brown smirch upon the yellow road.
2. fig. A moral stain or flaw; a blot or blemish; a fault or defect.
1862. T. A. Trollope, Marietta, iii. One who had blemished the fair escutcheon of the family by a smirch of heresy.
1877. L. Morris, Epic of Hades, III. 241. Before the soil And smirch of sadder knowledge … Sully its primal whiteness.
1897. B. Harrison, in Outing, XXIX. 559/2. The Provençal … is smitten with that strange insensibility to the sufferings of animals which draws such an ugly smirch across the whole Latin race.
