smart [OE] The first English use of smart was as a verb meaning ‘be painful’, which survives in the verb meaning ‘to feel a sharp, stinging pain in a part of the body’—its root is probably related to Latin mordere ‘to bite’. The original meaning of the adjective was ‘causing sharp pain’, which led to ‘keen or brisk’ and developed into the current senses of ‘mentally sharp, clever’ and ‘neat, well turned out’. We may call an irritating person who always has a clever answer a smart alec [M19th] after Aleck Hoag, a notorious thief and conman in New York in the 1840s, who earned the nickname Smart Alex from his reputation for not getting caught. In the late 17th century smart money was money paid to sailors and soldiers to compensate them for wounds. Smart here meant ‘physical pain’. Modern usage, from around 1900, refers to money bet by people with expert knowledge, with smart meaning ‘quick-witted’. The sugar-coated chocolate sweets called Smarties were launched in 1937. Because of their similar appearance to pills, doctors are sometimes accused of handing out drugs ‘like Smarties’ [M20th].