blot out

English

Verb

blot out (third-person singular simple present blots out, present participle blotting out, simple past and past participle blotted out)

1. Used other than figuratively or idiomatically: see blot,‎ out.
2. (transitive) To obscure.

   The moon blotted out the sun and all was dark.

   • 1726 October 28, [Jonathan Swift], “A Great Storm Described, the Long-Boat Sent to Fetch Water, the Author Goes with It to Discover the Country. […]”, in Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. […] [Gulliver’s Travels], volume I, London: […] Benj[amin] Motte, […], →OCLC, part II (A Voyage to Brobdingnag), page [176]:

     However, upon a ſtrict Review, I blotted out ſeveral Paſſages of leſs Moment which were in my firſt Copy, for fear of being cenſured as tedious and trifling, whereof Travellers are often, perhaps not without Juſtice, accuſed.

   • 1892, James Yoxall, chapter 5, in The Lonely Pyramid:

     The desert storm was riding in its strength; the travellers lay beneath the mastery of the fell simoom. […] Roaring, leaping, pouncing, the tempest raged about the wanderers, drowning and blotting out their forms with sandy spume.

   • 1960 January, G. Freeman Allen, “"Condor"—British Railways' fastest freight train”, in Trains Illustrated, page 48:

     From Keighley onwards we had obviously returned to civilisation, for the surrounding country was now studded with the sodium street lights of suburbia and a thickening industrial haze was blotting out the moon.

3. (transitive) To make indecipherable; to obliterate.
   • 1886 January 5, Robert Louis Stevenson, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, London: Longmans, Green, and Co., →OCLC:

     From the time he had left the house in Soho on the morning of the murder, he was simply blotted out; and gradually, as time drew on, Mr. Utterson began to recover from the hotness of his alarm, and to grow more at quiet with himself.

4. (transitive) To annihilate
   • 1611, The Holy Bible, […] (King James Version), London: […] Robert Barker, […], →OCLC, Genesis 7:4:

     And every living substance that I have made will I blot out from off the face of the earth.

Translations

to obscure

• Bulgarian: заличавам (bg) (zaličavam), скривам напълно (skrivam napǎlno)
• Finnish: peittää näkyvistä
• Italian: oscurare (it)
• Scottish Gaelic: dubh às
• Swedish: skymma (sv)

to obliterate

• French: effacer (fr)
• Italian: scomparire (it)
• Latin: oblitterō, expungō
• Scottish Gaelic: dubh às

Anagrams

• outblot