smudgy

[ smuhj-ee ]

adjective

, smudg·i·er, smudg·i·est.

1. marked with smudges; smeared; smeary.
2. emitting a stifling smoke; smoky.
3. British Dialect. humid; sweltering; sultry.

smudgy

/ smʌdʒɪ /

adjective

1. smeared, blurred, or soiled, or likely to become so
2. made deliberately indistinct or cloudy

   smudgy colours

Derived Forms

• ˈsmudginess, noun

Other Words From

• smudgi·ly adverb
• smudgi·ness noun

Word History and Origins

Origin of smudgy¹

First recorded in 1840–50; smudge + -y ¹

Example Sentences

“I’m a simple girl and I like smudgy makeup. It’s something that’s part of my character. I don’t like perfect s—, especially when it comes to my music and my life,” De Miguel said.

From Los Angeles Times

Smudgy cartoonlike pastels coexisted with raw plaster works and jewel boxes bedecked elaborately with wool, glass, straight pins, knives and sometimes taxidermized birds — animistic objects that resembled little else being made in the 1960s.

From New York Times

Though I, and much of the rest of the world, felt like my life was hurtling towards an ether of smudgy uncertainty, I came to find solace in quiet nights punctuated by "I Think You Should Leave's" wacky sketches.

From Salon

To Adam, who sees her only on Thanksgiving each year, his grandmother is “stooped, squarish, broad-faced, in brown wool pants and a brown cardigan that smelled of mothballs, with scuffed leather buttons dangling loose from black threads. Short gray hair that looked like she cut it herself. Pink-rimmed oversized glasses with smudgy lenses.”

From Washington Post

He was using shadow figures appropriated from an 18th-century diagram of the Brookes slave ship, reproducing them in rows as a serial motif across canvases that flicker between representation and smudgy abstraction and suggest the architecture of the prison.

From New York Times