smirch

• IPA^(key): /smɜː(ɹ)t͡ʃ/
• Rhymes: -ɜː(ɹ)tʃ

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Attested since the 15th century; possibly from Old French esmorcher (“to torture”), from Latin morsus (“bitten”) or from Dutch smerig (“dirty, gross”)

smirch (countable and uncountable, plural smirches)

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

     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. (figurative) 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.

   Synonyms: besmirch, soil

   • c. 1598–1600 (date written), William Shakespeare, “As You Like It”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount, published 1623, OCLC 606515358, [Act I, scene iii], lines 101–104:

     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, figurative) To harm the reputation of; to smear or slander.

   Synonym: besmirch

• besmirch

• Douglas Harper (2001–2023), “smirch”, in Online Etymology Dictionary.

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, →ISBN, page 133:

     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