smirch

• Rhymes: -ɜː(ɹ)tʃ

Attested since the 15th Century CE; possibly from Old French esmorcher (“to torture”), from Latin morsus (“bitten”).

smirch (countable and uncountable, plural smirches)

1. Dirt, or a stain.
   • 1998, Michael Foss, People of the First Crusade, page 6, →ISBN.

     Too often, in the years between 800 and 1050, the everyday sun declined through the smirch of flame and smoke of a monastery or town robbed and burnt.

2. (figuratively) A stain on somebody's reputation.
   • 2008, W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, page 33, →ISBN.

     there were some business transactions which savored of dangerous speculation, if not dishonesty; and around it all lay the smirch of the Freedmen's Bank.

smirch (third-person singular simple present smirches, present participle smirching, simple past and past participle smirched)

1. (transitive) To dirty; to make dirty.
   • 1600, William Shakespeare, As You Like It, Act I Scene III, lines 101-04

     CELIA. I'll put myself in poor and mean attire,

     And with a kind of umber smirch my face;

     The like do you; so shall we pass along,

     And never stir assailants.

2. (transitive, figuratively) To harm the reputation of; to smear or slander.

• besmirch
• soil

• besmirch

• “smirch” in Douglas Harper, Online Etymology Dictionary, 2001–2019.

Meld of smear and chirp

smirch (plural smirches)

1. A chirp of radiation power from an astronomical body that has a smeared appearance on its plot in the time-frequency plane (usually associated with massive bodies orbiting supermassive black holes)
   • 2003, B. S. Sathyaprakash, BF Schutz, "Templates for stellar mass black holes falling into supermassive black holes", Classical and Quantum Gravity, volume 20, no. 10

     The strain h(t) produced by a smirch in LISA is given by h(t) = −-A(t)cos[(t) + φ(t)]

   • 2005, John M. T. Thompson, Advances in Astronomy: From the Big Bang to the Solar System, page 133, →ISBN.

     By observing a smirch, LISA offers a unique opportunity to directly map the spacetime geometry around the central object and test whether or not this structure is in accordance with the expectations of general realtivity.

• chirms, chrism