Definition of "fug"

'Made one quite thankful to get back to the fug, though as a rule I think the way these trains are overheated is something scandalous'.

1934, Agatha Christie, chapter 8, in Murder on the Orient Express, London: HarperCollins, published 2017, page 131

On certain days, when hot currents shimmered off Oyster's Reef, we would detect the chalk-dust of the mullock heaps, acrid; or, from the opal mines themselves, the ghastly fug of the tunnels and shafts.

1996, Janette Turner Hospital, Oyster, paperback edition, Virago Press, page 4

The gym teacher left that year, his successors had no interest in boxing, and society soon passed into a zone where the idea of thirteen-year-old boys punching each other's faces for educational purposes became as unthinkable as the dense fug of tobacco smoke in our school's staff room.

2004 November 8, John Derbyshire, “Boxing Day”, in National Review

The misty fug his breath had left on the window sparkled in the orange glare of the streetlamp outside.

2005 July 16, J. K. Rowling [pseudonym; Joanne Rowling], Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (Harry Potter; 6), London: Bloomsbury Publishing

That's what a fug was. You could have cut cubes out of the air and sold it for cheap building material.

2008, Terry Pratchett, Going Postal, page 288

Inside, though, the little café was warm and bright, with a comforting fug of tea and baked bread and cakes.

2013, Benjamin Black, Elegy for April

So delicious after the fug of summer. It makes one feel so alive.

2011, Olivia Manning, The Spoilt City: The Balkan Trilogy 2

Somewhere in the fug of her mind she remembered how to close it and fetched the pole, slotting it into the mechanism above and beginning to turn the handles.

2015, Kate Riordan, The Girl in the Photograph

There was a fug of fear in the room.

2002, Chris Beckett, “Marcher”, in The Year's Best Science Fiction: Nineteenth Annual Collection

Viewed from this perspective, the Victorian era reeks of a suffocating and bigoted complacency, and, no doubt, many white imperialists existed in a fug of self-righteous superiority.

2006, Colin Kidd, The Forging of Races

But now am in total fug about what to text Roxster about tonight, and whether I should tell him about the nits.

2013, Helen Fielding, Bridget Jones: Mad about the Boy, page 7

Her translations are dimmed over with a fug of late eighteenthcentury poetic diction, a striving for sublimity or for sentimental effect.

2014, Robert Anthony Welch, The Cold of May Day Monday: An Approach to Irish Literary History

Inside, the Golden Lion was fugged with the smoke of too many cigarettes and the unhappy sound of a darts team practising.

2008, Antony Moore, The Swap, page 231

I'd walked down, for maybe the last time, from my lodgings behind New Fish Street, through air already fugged with smoke from the morning fires.

2012, Phil Rickman, The Heresy of Dr Dee

The rich sewer gases fugged around her and she shook her head, trying to clear it.

2013, Tom Pollock, The Glass Republic: The Skyscraper Throne

"Well, I like it a jolly sight better than fugging up in those carriages with all that gassing crowd of Garden Home fussers."

1921, Everybody's Magazine - Volume 44, page 38

The air was warm and close and the late afternoon sun was fugging through grey clouds and making them light - still grey, but light, really light.

2005, Craig Taylor, Light, page 74

The adrenalin, though diminished, was still running through my veins; the red mist was lifting but my mind was fugged by this unfamiliar combination of hormones, slowly intermingling with indignity and contrition and the dawning of familiar, ignominious defeat.

2011, Richard Herring, How Not to Grow Up!: A Coming of Age Memoir. Sort Of., pages 34–35

It's always somethin' or other. Ah, fug it. I'm away now.

1985, Herbert A. Applebaum, Blue Chips, Brunswick Pub. Co., page 126

Oh fug. Whad a mess.

2012, Drew Campbell, Dead Letter House

“Why is this door locked?” she shouts. “Oh fug!”

2015, Lynn Lindquist, Secret of the Sevens