blot out

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.

   • 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 762755901:

     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 964384981, Genesis 7:4:

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

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