Other forms: tarnished, tarnishing, tarnishes
Tarnish is what happens to silver left too long in a drawer: the shine goes, and a dull grey-brown film creeps over it. You tarnish metal, and metal tarnishes on its own.
Most of the time you will meet the word nowhere near the cutlery, attached instead to a name: a scandal that tarnished his reputation, a defeat that tarnished an otherwise perfect season, a tarnished legacy. It means the thing is dulled rather than destroyed, and that is the whole point of choosing it, because you can still see the shine underneath. It takes an object or none at all, so both the silver tarnished and the story tarnished him are correct. Tarnish is a noun too, the film itself, which is what silver polish is sold to take off. The word you want for the opposite is untarnished, as in an untarnished record.
1verbtarnishTo lose brightness, or to make metal lose its brightness, through a film forming on the surface.~25%
“The brass handles had tarnished to a dull brown.”
synonyms: dull, discolour
2verbsullyTo spoil someone's good name or the good image of a thing.~50%
“The affair tarnished a reputation he had spent thirty years building.”
3noundullThe dull film that forms on the surface of a metal.~25%
“A little polish took the tarnish off the teapot.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 12 sentences found in the wild and placed 12 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
tarnish is a dulling of a surface.
Tarnish came from Old French ternir, to make dim or make wan, which French had borrowed from Old High German tarnen, and that word meant to conceal. Proto-West Germanic darnijan, to conceal, sits at the head of the line. So tarnishing is a kind of hiding: the metal is still bright, with something drawn across it.
Proto-West Germanic
*darnijan — to conceal
Old High German
*ternen
Old French
ternir
Middle English
ternysshen
English, today
tarnish
Built from
From Middle English ternysshen, from Old French ternir, stem of ternir (“to make dim, make wan”), borrowed from Old High German ternen, tarnen, from Proto-West Germanic darnijan (“to conceal”). a doublet of dern and darn.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA