blot out

blot out

1. Used other than with a figurative or idiomatic meaning: 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.

3. (transitive) To make indecipherable; to obliterate.
   • 1886, Robert Louis Stevenson, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

     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
   • Genesis 7.4

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