smutch

Etymology

Perhaps an alteration of smudge, smatch, or smooch.

verb

1. To soil, stain or smudge.
   Have you seene but a bright Lilly grow, Before rude hands have touch’d it? Have you mark’d but the fall of Snow, 1616, Ben Jonson, The Divell is an Asse, London, published 1641, act II, scene 6, page 26
   And then in came a wee girl of seven, with dirty face and pure blue eyes and a smutched and insufficient dress. 1909, O. Henry, “Supply and Demand”, in Options, New York: Harper, page 126
   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. 1928, Stephen Vincent Benét, “Invocation”, in John Brown’s Body, New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, page 7
2. To eat noisily, as with one's mouth open.

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. 1629, John Smith, “An Exposition of the Lord’s Prayer”, in Essex doue, presenting the world with a few of her oliue branches, London: George Edwardes, page 124
   I could favour you with sundry touches Of the paint-smutches with which the Duchess 1849, Robert Browning, “The Flight of the Duchess”, in Poems, volume 2, London: Chapman and Hall, page 390
   Looking out of her window, she was alerted by a smutch of bronze light glowering on this Anglo-Flemish landscape. 1979, Patrick White, The Twyborn Affair, Penguin, published 1981, Part 3, p. 411