The actuator line was intended as a lifting line technique for CFD applications. In this paper we proof -theoretically and practically -that smearing the forces of the actuator line in the flow domain necessarily leads to smeared velocity fields. By combining a near-wake representation of the trailed vorticity with a viscous vortex core model, the missing induction from the smeared velocity is recovered. This novel dynamic smearing correction is verified for basic wing test cases and rotor simulations of a multi-MW turbine. The latter cover the entire operational wind speed range as well as yaw, strong turbulence and pitch 5 step cases. The correction is validated with lifting line simulations with and without viscous core, that are representative of an actuator line without and with smearing correction, respectively. The dynamic smearing correction makes the actuator line effectively act as a lifitng line, as it was originally intended. 10 The actuator line (AL) technique developed by Sørensen and Shen (2002) is a lifting-line (LL) representation of the wind turbine rotor suitable for computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations. It captures transient physical features like shed and trailed vorticity (including root/tip vortices) , without the computational cost associated with resolving the full rotor geometry. The AL model thus enables Large-eddy simulations (LES) of large wind farms in realistic, turbulent atmospheric boundary layers (Vollmer et al., 2017).15However, different to LL vortex formulations the blade forces are dispersed in the flow domain -most commonly in form of a Gaussian projection -to avoid numerical instability. A length scale -also referred to as smearing factor -controls this force redistribution, whose lower limit is linked to the grid size through numerical stability requirements (Troldborg et al., 2009). Mikkelsen (2003 observed a large sensitivity of the blade velocities to this length scale, which consequently also propagated to the blade forces. Especially in regions along the blade exhibiting stark load changes, as around the root and tip, forces 20 are substantially over-predicted. Meaning this effect is exacerbated by non-tapered and low aspect ratio blades. As actuator disc formulations suffer from similar issues towards the blade tip, their Glauert (1935) type tip corrections are also frequently applied to ALs (Shen et al., 2005). Yet, these correct discs for missing discrete blades and thus should be unnecessary -strictly even invalid -for ALs. Shives and Crawford (2013) and Jha et al. (2014) achieved a reduction in the force over-prediction Wind Energ. Sci. Discuss., https://doi.