1597 T. Middleton Wisdome of Solomon Paraphr. xii. sig. P Too much seede doth turne to too much soote.

1690 W. Temple Ess. Gardens of Epicurus in Miscellanea: 2nd Pt. I found my Vines..apt for several years to a Soot or Smuttiness upon their leaves.

1789 J. Wolcot Subj. for Painters in Wks. (1812) II. 157 'Tis what the Prince of Soot hath often done.

1837 T. Carlyle French Revol. II. i. ii. 22 In that soot-bleared figure, most earnest of created things.

1839 C. Dickens Nicholas Nickleby xvi. 139 A soot-bespeckled prospect of tiles and chimney-pots.

1871 C. Kingsley At Last II. xi. 103 Here and there some huge tree had burnt as it stood, and rose like a soot-grimed tower.

1894 ‘M. Twain’ in Cent. Mag. 48 17/1 It rained all day..apparently trying its best to wash that soot-blackened town [sc. St. Louis] white.

1916 J. Joyce Portrait of Artist iii. 132 The sootcoated packet of pictures which he had hidden in the flue of the fireplace.

1921 W. de la Mare Veil & Other Poems 68 Slow wreathed the grease adown from soot-clogged wick.

1932 W. Faulkner Light in August vi. 111 Memory..knows remembers believes a corridor in a big long garbled cold echoing building of dark red brick sootbleakened by more chimneys than its own.

1947 W. de la Mare Coll. Stories for Children 122 Chapped, soot-roughened hands.

1956 D. Gascoyne Night Thoughts 23 The soot-suffused sky-canopy.

1977 H. Fast Immigrants i. 29 The still half-naked citizens, soot-blackened and homeless, greeted the ruin as they had always greeted their city.

1844 H. Stephens Bk. of Farm III. 1247 The soot-sowing machine.

1930 Engineering 16 May 627/1 Steam driers had met with little success while soot-blowers had been widely introduced.

1967 Trans. Inst. Engineers & Shipbuilders in Scotland CX. 36 Naval boilers, up to the end of the last war, were not normally provided with sootblowers.

1878 W. J. Walsham Handbk. Surg. Pathol. xiii. 369 From the great frequency with which it occurs in chimney-sweepers, cancer of the scrotum is generally designated the soot- or sweeps-cancer.

1891 Cent. Dict. Soot-dew,..a black, fuliginous coating covering parts of living plants.

1957 E. E. Evans Irish Folk Ways ix. 120 The soot~houses..whose roofs..were stripped in spring in the days when the whole family migrated to the summer pastures. At any rate the soot-house season runs from October to May... In the Hebrides it was customary to strip the soot-laden thatch of the black-houses annually for use as manure, and the roof was left without a smoke-hole to encourage the deposit of soot.

1966 Daily Tel. 21 Apr. 4/7 On Achill Island off the west coast of Ireland are the remains of some small buildings... They are called ‘soot houses’ and were used for the production of soot for fertilising the potato crop.

?1810 P. Pott Observ. Chimney Sweeper's Cancer 4 It is a disease which always makes its first attack on..the inferior part of the scrotum..: the trade calls it the soot-wart.

1869 T. H. Tanner Man. Pract. Med. (ed. 6) I. 126 Since the Act of Parliament made the use of machinery imperative, the soot-wart has been less frequently seen.

1602 J. Marston Antonios Reuenge ii. ii. sig. D^v The black filth of sinne, That soots thy heart.

1634 W. Wood New Englands Prospect ii. xix. 96 The young Infant being greased and sooted, wrapt in a Beaver skin [etc.].

1655 T. Fuller Church-hist. Brit. iii. 107 The smoake thereof would have sooted his Green suit.

1706 J. Stevens New Spanish Dict. i Hollinár, to soot, to daub with Soot.

1796 W. Withering Arrangem. Brit. Plants (ed. 3) I. 82 Sooty,..dark and dirty as if sooted, as are some of the Lichens.

a1859 T. De Quincey Posthumous Wks. (1891) I. 34 He paints himself histrionically; he soots his face.

1707 J. Mortimer Whole Art Husbandry (1721) I. 325 Whether it was because the other Land was sooted before, I could never yet find.

1733 W. Ellis Chiltern & Vale Farming 28 He..harrowed in his Barly and sooted it on the top.

1776 W. Marshall Minutes Agric. 16 Aug. (1778) Part was dunged; part, sooted; and part, undressed.

1929 W. E. Collinson Spoken Eng. (ed. 10) 84 The engine is knocking. One of the [sparking] plugs is probably sooted up.

1959 M. Pugh Chancer i. 9 London was sooting me up and I couldn't shed it, layer by layer, like the plane-trees in the park.

1706 J. Stevens New Spanish Dict. i Tiznadúra, Smutting, Sooting, Blacking, Smearing.

1903 Cassell's Suppl. Add. Sooting,..the impregnation of the sparking plug with soot, due to combustion of the explosive mixture when carbureting is bad.

1925 Morris Owner's Man. iv. 46 Bad plug insulation is sometimes caused through sooting.