Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Blot \Blot\, v. t. [imp. & p. p. Blotted; p. pr. & vb. n. Blotting.] [Cf. Dan. plette. See 3d Blot.]
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To spot, stain, or bespatter, as with ink.
The brief was writ and blotted all with gore.
--Gascoigne. -
To impair; to damage; to mar; to soil.
It blots thy beauty, as frosts do bite the meads.
--Shak. -
To stain with infamy; to disgrace.
Blot not thy innocence with guiltless blood.
--Rowe. -
To obliterate, as writing with ink; to cancel; to efface; -- generally with out; as, to blot out a word or a sentence. Often figuratively; as, to blot out offenses.
One act like this blots out a thousand crimes.
--Dryden. -
To obscure; to eclipse; to shadow.
He sung how earth blots the moon's gilded wane.
--Cowley. -
To dry, as writing, with blotting paper.
Syn: To obliterate; expunge; erase; efface; cancel; tarnish; disgrace; blur; sully; smear; smutch.
Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
mid-15c., verbal noun from blot (v.). Blotting paper is recorded from 1510s.
Wiktionary
n. 1 A blot; a stain. 2 The process by which something is blotted. vb. (present participle of blot English)
WordNet
See blot
Wikipedia
Usage examples of "blotting".
In all likelihood, the Autocrat had saved dozens of lives this day by blotting out the leaders in this pointless fight.
There was a table with writing paper and a bottle of Quink ink and blotting paper.
Nylan was blotting his forehead, and even Relyn had opened his jacket by the time a single rider cantered down the road from the ridge.
Clouds drifted across the sky more frequently now, intermit tendy blotting out my guide on the horizon.
Louder and louder grew the slow, powerful drumming as the beat reverberated back and forth throughout the cellblock, blotting out the sound of the radio and television speakers still blaring inanely into the cavern while the prisoner was tortured and his fellows stormed in helpless fury.
And the four girls, all staring at the silver coin, waded through the muddy water and stood before Domini and Androvsky, blotting out the glaring sunshine with their young figures.
Some say that the star will grow and grow until it fills the sky, blotting out the sun and moon and stars.
The use of thin inks would have caused spreading or blotting and thus rendered the writing illegible.
Startled, Ismene looked up and saw the form of a dragon briefly blotting out the sun as it flew overhead.
It was the first summer khamseen of the year, and for the moment I wished I had gone north with the tourist and the quail and the billiard marker, for khamseen fetches the marrow out of the bones, and turns the body to blotting paper.
It seems hardly credible, and yet it is certainly a fact, that a bit of hardboiled white of egg, first thoroughly dried, then soaked for some minutes in water and rolled on blotting paper, should yield in a few hours enough animal matter to the glands to cause them to secrete, and afterwards the lobes to close.
Before the employment of blotting paper a pouncebox which contained either powdered gum sandarach and ground cuttle-fish bones, or powdered charcoal, sand and like materials was used by shaking it like a pepperbox on freshly written manuscripts.
Gundhalinu ignored him, an image of Sparks Dawntreader in a helmet of spines suddenly blotting out his sight.
They were goaded by archdevils whose hosts mounted the skies in their thousands and tens of thousands, blotting out die bloody vault with their bodies.
Instead, leaning on the shelf among the telegram forms and scraps of pink blotting paper, I wrote each week a report to October, making sure that no one from the stables looked over my shoulder.