blot

Old Norse blót named a sacrifice offered to the gods in Scandinavia before Christianization. The noun is recorded in Icelandic texts that preserve earlier pagan vocabulary from the Viking Age. Its world was ritual, not ink. A blót was an act of worship marked by offerings and ceremony.

From the noun came the verb blóta, meaning to worship with sacrifice and later to speak of idolatrous rites. When Old Norse terms passed into English and Scots writing, the family around blot shifted away from ritual use. By the late Middle English and early modern periods, blot had settled into the sense of a spot, stain, or disfiguring mark. The old sacred force had turned into visible damage.

English writers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries used blot for an ink mark, a smear, or a moral blemish on a reputation. That broadened the word from the page to the conscience. A spilled mark and a spoiled name could be called by the same word. The semantic move is clear: what mars a surface can also mar a life.

Modern English keeps both the physical and figurative senses. A blot is still a dark mark on paper, cloth, or skin, and it is also a stain on honor or memory. The older Norse ritual sense survives only in historical discussion of pagan religion. The word now lives where damage shows.