smirch

Dirt, or a stain.

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.

A stain on somebody's reputation.

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.

To dirty; to make dirty.

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.

Girls thought that by leaping over the fires without being smirched they made sure of a happy marriage.

To harm the reputation of; to smear or slander.

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)

The strain h(t) produced by a smirch in LISA is given by h(t) = −-A(t)cos[(t) + φ(t)]

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.