blot

UK/blɒt/US/blɑt/

nounB2Occasional — familiar, but not everyday · #8,487 of 15,258neutral

Other forms: blots

A blot is a spot of spilled ink, or a stain on a reputation. An ink blot, a blot on the landscape, blot his record.

Blotting paper was a necessity until ballpoint pens, and blotting means pressing to absorb rather than rubbing. A blot on the landscape is an ugly building. To blot out means to hide completely. The origin of the word is uncertain.

Definitions of blot

1nounblotA spot of spilled ink, or a stain on a reputation.B2
“The old pen left an ink blot at the bottom of the letter.”

blot is a stain.

Where it comes from

Middle English blot, of uncertain origin, perhaps from Old Norse blettr, a stain.

Middle English
blot — blot, spot, stain, blemish
English, today
blot

From Middle English blot (“blot, spot, stain, blemish”). Perhaps from Old Norse blettr (“blot, stain”) (only attested in documents from after Old Norse transitioned to Icelandic blettur), or from Old French bloche (“clod of earth”).

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in A Song of Ice and Fire

Practise this word

blot in the wild

The northern blot, or RNA blot, is a technique used in molecular biology research to study gene expression by detection of RNA (or isolated mRNA) in a sample.
Northern blot
The northern blot technique was developed in 1977 by James Alwine, David Kemp, and George Stark at Stanford University.
Northern blot
The name Western blot is a play on the Southern blot, a technique for DNA detection named after its inventor, English biologist Edwin Southern.
Western blot
Similarly, detection of RNA is termed as northern blot.
Western blot
A dot blot (or slot blot) is a technique in molecular biology used to detect proteins.
Dot blot

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From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

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