[Related to SMUDGE v.2]
1. A suffocating smoke. Now U.S.
1767. Mason, in Corresp. w. Gray (1853), 401. I will sacrifice the first stanza on your critical altar, and let it consume either in flame or smudge as it choose.
1781. J. Hutton, Tour to Caves (ed. 2), Gloss. 96. Smudge, a suffocating smoke.
1879. J. Burroughs, Locusts & Wild Honey, 125. No smoke or smudge.
1896. C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne, in Pall Mall Mag., Sept., 63. A small fire of green wood was making a smoke—or ‘smudge,’ to use the Floridan vernacular.
2. A heap of combustibles ignited and emitting dense smoke, usually made with the object of repelling mosquitoes, etc. Chiefly U.S. and Canada.
1842. Mrs. C. M. Kirkland, Forest Life, xviii. I. 183. I have had a ‘smudge’ made in a chafing-dish at my bed-side.
1880. Mary Fitzgibbon, Trip to Manitoba, x. 129. Many people who live on the prairies, instead of going for their cattle at milking time, build a smudge (a fire of chips mulched with wet hay or green twigs when well started, to create smoke) near the milk-house, and the cattle will come to the fire to obtain relief from the mosquitoes.
1893. Earl Dunmore, Pamirs, I. 346. We had three or four smudges made, the smoke from which nearly blinded us.
attrib. 1882. W. H. Bishop, in Harper’s Mag., Oct., 724/1. The most effectual of these is to kindle smudge fires about the vineyard.
