Definitions

from The Century Dictionary.

  • Tarnished with smoke; sooty; foul; squalid; filthy.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • adjective obsolete Smoky; reeky; hence, begrimed with dirt.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • adjective smoky, dirty, squalid

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From reech.

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Examples

  • She must not let him wheedle compliance out of her 'for a pair of reechy kisses', or 'paddling in your neck with his damned fingers'.

    Shakespeare Bevington, David 2002

  • I could feel the urge for his neck in my hands for one brief instant before sanity clamped down, and I considered what to do while dodging his reechy kisses.

    A Letter of Mary King, Laurie R. 1996

  • I could feel the urge for his neck in my hands for one brief instant before sanity clamped down, and I considered what to do while dodging his reechy kisses.

    A Letter of Mary King, Laurie R. 1996

  • Seest thou not, I say, what a deformed thief this fashion is? how giddily he turns about all the hot bloods between fourteen and five-and-thirty? sometime fashioning them like Pharaoh’s soldiers in the reechy painting; sometime like god Bel’s priests in the old church-window; sometime like the shaven Hercules in the smirched worm-eaten tapestry, where his cod-piece seems as massy as his club?

    Act III. Scene III. Much Ado about Nothing 1914

  • Great men have been unfaithful to their marital vows, but it has been those of mediocre minds and india-rubber morals who have cowered at the feet of mistresses -- who have thrown their world away for reechy kisses shared by others.

    The Complete Works of Brann the Iconoclast, Volume 1. 1898

  • Accordingly, we meet in Shakspeare _reckless_ and _rechless_, _reeky_ and _reechy_; "As I could _pike_ (pitch) my lance."

    Notes and Queries, Number 185, May 14, 1853 A Medium of Inter-communication for Literary Men, Artists, Antiquaries, Genealogists, etc. Various 1852

  • He points out where the various family members slept, including a reechy loft for the unmarried girls.

    The Full Feed from HuffingtonPost.com Richard Bangs 2012

  • There goes 'the seld shown flamen, _puffing_ his way to _win a vulgar station_,' here is a 'veiled dame' who lets us see that 'war of white and damask in her nicely gawded cheeks,' a moment; -- look at that 'kitchen malkin,' peering over the wall there with 'her richest lockram' 'pinned on her reechy neck,' eyeing the hero as he passes; and look at this poor baby here, this Elizabethan baby, saved, conserved alive, crying himself

    The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded Delia Bacon 1835

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  • Smug folk, the pompous and preachy;

    And rich ones, so haughty and chichi,

    Like us were begotten

    By primates besotten

    In some cavern frigid and reechy.

    December 20, 2015