Besmirch

WORD OF THE DAY

besmirch / verb / bih-SMERCH

Definition
1: to cause harm or damage to the purity, luster, or beauty of (something)
2: sully, soil

Examples
"In a must-have game for the season, Texas must have had one blown opportunity after another in a contest besmirched with critical personal foul penalties, poor blocking and Thompson's first pick six, a play that completely turned the outcome of the game. And perhaps the season."
— Kirk Bohls, The Austin (Texas) American-Statesman, 17 Oct. 2021

And a failure to fulfill the now apparently near-impossible tasks of evacuating all the Afghan translators, workers and fixers on whom the US relied and who now face Taliban retribution would besmirch America’s conscience and global reputation.
— Stephen Collinson, CNN, 16 Aug. 2021

Did You Know?
Since the prefix be- in besmirch means "to make or cause to be," when you besmirch something, you cause it to have a smirch.
What's a smirch? A smirch is a stain, and to smirch something is to stain it or make it dirty. By extension, the verb smirch came to mean "to bring discredit or disgrace on."
Smirch and besmirch, then, mean essentially the same thing.
We have William Shakespeare to thank for the variation in form. His uses of the term in Hamlet:
"And now no soil nor cautel doth besmirch the virtue of his will" and Henry V: "Our gayness and our gilt are all besmirch'd with rainy marching in the painful field" are the first known appearances of besmirch in English.