smudgy
/ˈsmʌ.d͡ʒi/
smudgy adjective: marked with smudges.
Adjective
smudgy (comparative smudgier, superlative smudgiest)
- 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.1979, Roald Dahl, The Twits
- 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...1918, The Saturday Evening Post, page 13
- […] the black, smudgy fog billowing up before his eyes, blotting out the peculiar smile on the face of the white lady. It was only then that he could feel the cold claws of terror clutching at his throat and heart.1983, George Henry Johnston, Charmian Clift, Strong-man from Piraeus and Other Stories, page 114
- 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[…]1998, American Aviation Historical Society, AAHS Journal
- […] under overcast skies. "It's a smudgy day," Alex observes. Indeed, a light drizzle falls from clouds that look as though they've been rubbed out with a fat eraser.2000, Daniel Asa Rose, Hiding Places: A Father and His Sons Retrace Their Family's Escape from the Holocaust, Simon and Schuster, →ISBN, page 160
- Hot and humid or stuffy; sweltering.
- […] and the smudgy heat cast from the cavernous fireplace.1985, Anne Moore, Tangled Vows, →ISBN
- blawing weather[:] Hot close smudgy weather when flies 'blow' or 'strike' sheep very much1997, Mabel Peacock, The Peacock Lincolnshire Word Books: 1884-1920 : with Additions Dating from the 18th and Earlier 19th Centuries
Examples of smudgy in a sentence
- 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.1918, The Saturday Evening Post, page 13:
- And that's known as smudgy?" "By me it is."2019 March 5, Martin Suter, Allmen and the Pink Diamond, New Vessel Press, →ISBN:
- A smudgy heat spread a blanket over the city and laid there, unmoved for weeks.2021 August 16, Rana Bitar M.D., The Long Tale of Tears and Smiles: An Oncologist's Journey, Global Collective Publishers, →ISBN, page 73:
Forms of smudgy
| comparative | smudgier |
|---|---|
| superlative | smudgiest |
| alternative form | smudgey |
Origin of smudgy
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.)
Words formed from smudgy
Questions about smudgy
- What does smudgy mean?
- Smudgy means marked with smudges.
- How do you use smudgy in a sentence?
- 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.
- What part of speech is smudgy?
- Smudgy is an adjective.
- How do you pronounce smudgy?
- Smudgy is pronounced /ˈsmʌ.d͡ʒi/.
Words near smudgy in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: smudgy (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.
Last updated:
Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Vealhurl-smudgy.wav.
Cite this entry: “smudgy.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/smudgy. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.