befoul

Etymology

be- + foul

verb

1. To make foul; to soil; to contaminate, pollute.
   1897, Robert Gwynneddon Davies (translator), The Sleeping Bard by Ellis Wynne, London: Simplkon, Marshall & Co., Part I, At last, what with a round of blasphemy, and the whole crowd with clay pistols belching smoke and fire and slander of their neighbours, and the floor already befouled with dregs and spittle, I feared lest viler deeds should happen, and craved to depart.
   Only the four walls of his home still stood, blackened and smoking with the sluggish, stinking smoke that befouled the sea-wind. 1983, Mary Stewart, chapter 5, in The Wicked Day, New York: William Morrow, page 53
   1997, Ted Hughes, Tales from Ovid, “Echo and Narcissus” in Paul Keegan (ed.), Ted Hughes: Collected Poems, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003, p. 919, There was a pool of perfect water. […] No cattle Had slobbered their muzzles in it And befouled it.
2. (specifically) To defecate on, to soil with excrement.
   For its an ill Bird will befoule her own Nest […] 1666, George Alsop, A Character of the Province of Mary-Land, London: Peter Dring, Preface
3. (figurative) To stain or mar (for example with infamy or disgrace).
   For three days Pete bore himself according to his wont, thinking to silence the evil tongues of the little world about him, and keep sweet and alive the dear name which they were waiting to befoul and destroy. 1894, Hall Caine, The Manxman, London: Heinemann, Part 5, p. 282
   […] you combine a vulgar atheism and an iconoclastic desire to befoul the sacred ideas of the average man or woman, collectively scorned as the bourgeoisie—— 1923, James Branch Cabell, The High Place, London: John Lane, Part 2, Chapter 15
   There she sits before you, gentlemen, betrayed by her husband, befouled by every idle tongue that wags […] 1927, Frances Noyes Hart, chapter 5, in The Bellamy Trial, Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran & Co., published 1929, page 159
4. To entangle or run against so as to impede motion.