smudgy

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smudgy

  • /ˈsmʌ.d͡ʒi/

Where it comes from

From smudge (“blemish; dense smoke; to obscure by smearing; to stifle”) + -y. (The sense "rainy" is related to dialectal use of smudge to mean drizzling rain.)

adjective smudgier · smudgiest · smudgey

  1. Marked with smudges. As you know, an ordinary unhairy face like yours or mine simply gets a bit smudgy if it is not washed often enough, and there's nothing so awful about that. But a hairy face is a very different matter.
  2. Like a thick smoke (such as is emitted by a smudge pot); thick and smoky or smokelike. Pierre lighted his pipe and immediately the air about him because heavy, not with the aromatic perfume of choice Havanna but with a smudgy fog that made John cough. The cough was genuine, but John emphasized it a little as a suggestion that the coarse odor was anything but welcome- without, however,
  3. Rainy or drizzly. Smudgy weather greeted Torpedo Five who had to dodge cloud banks and rain squalls as they flew at altitudes between 3,000 and 4,000 feet toward Guadalcanal and Tulagi. Finally the large island of Guadalcanal loomed ahead. Soon, they[…]
  4. Hot and humid or stuffy; sweltering. […] and the smudgy heat cast from the cavernous fireplace.

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MLA

"smudgy." Wiktionary, via Micwyn, micwyn.com/word/smudgy. Accessed 6 Nov. 2026.

APA

smudgy. (n.d.). In Wiktionary, via Micwyn. Retrieved November 6, 2026, from https://micwyn.com/word/smudgy

Chicago

"smudgy." Wiktionary, via Micwyn. Accessed November 6, 2026. https://micwyn.com/word/smudgy.

BibTeX
@misc{smudgy_2026,
  title = {smudgy},
  howpublished = {Wiktionary, via Micwyn},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://micwyn.com/word/smudgy},
  urldate = {2026-11-06}
}