smack [OE] English has many smacks. Smack as in ‘it smacks of fish’ is based on Old English smaec ‘flavour or smell’. The one meaning both ‘to part your lips noisily’ and ‘to strike someone’, arrived from Dutch smacken in the mid 16th century. Initially people smacked their lips in the context of eating and drinking and, later, kissing, but by the early 19th century the word was being used in the sense of hitting someone. The smack [E17th] that is a kind of sailing vessel is also Dutch, while the slang word for ‘heroin’ [M20th] is probably from Yiddish schmeck, ‘a sniff, a smell’, from the same Germanic root as the Old English smack.