[UN-1 8.]
1. Having no bottom; bottomless. Also fig.
1615. Sylvester, Tobacco Battered, 192. Tobacco’s smoakie Mists Which … No small addition of Adustion fit Bring to the smoak of the Unbottom’d Pit.
1630. J. Taylor (Water P.), World’s Eighth Wonder, Wks. II. 67/1. The nine and forty wenches, water filling, In tubs vnbottom’d, which was euer spilling.
1667. Milton, P. L., II. 405. Who shall tempt with wandring feet The dark unbottom’d infinite Abyss?
1704. Moderat. Displ., x. From Faction’s dark unbottom’d Cell I come.
1778. Conciliation, 7. Mir’d and found’ring in th’ unbottom’d Pit.
1802. Leyden, Mermaid, 44. If, from the unbottom’d deep… The sea-snake heave his snowy mane.
b. fig. Unfathomable.
1760–72. H. Brooke, Fool of Qual. (1809), I. 150. I will no longer make my ignorance a sounding-line for his [God’s] unbottomed wisdom.
2. Having no proper foundation; unsupported; not founded on or in something.
1640. Gauden, Love of Truth (1641), 21. For errour is so feeble and unbottomed, that it must have some butresses and seeming basis of truth to support it.
1650. Ashmole, Chym. Collect., Prol. 3. Others there are, who out of Ignorance or Mistake, have delivered blinde and unbottomed Fictions.
1675. H. More, in R. Ward, Life (1710), 272. The Question,… whether there be no Love unbottomed on Self-love?
1742. Young, Nt. Th., VIII. 801. Can joy, unbottom’d in reflection, stand? And, in a tempest, can reflection live?
