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Adjective: "Not having seen the object beforehand."
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1663
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1712 1720
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1866 1892
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1902
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2005
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1663, Samuel Butler, Hudibras, part 1, canto 2, lines 638–641:For to subscribe, unsight, unseen, / To an unknown Church-discipline, / What is it else, but before-hand / T'engage, and after understand?
1712 October 16, Joseph Addison, “On Seducers—Procuresses—Letter from one”, in The Spectator, number 511, quoted in The Works of Joseph Addison, volume 2, page 274, published 1842:It seems the general of the Tartars, after having laid siege to a strong town in China, and taken it by storm, would set to sale all the women that were found in it. Accordingly he put each of them into a sack, and, after having thoroughly considered the value of the woman who was enclosed, marked the price that was demanded for her upon the sack. There was a great confluence of chapmen, that resorted from every part, with a design to purchase, which they were to do 'unsight unseen.'
1720, Daniel Defoe, Captain Singleton, page 311:Their new Chaps were so eager, that they would have bargain'd with the old Captain before-hand: Nay Friend, said he, I will not trade with thee unsight and unseen; neither do I know whether the Master of the Sloop may not have sold his Loading already to some Merchants of Salset; but if he has not, when I come to him, I think to bring him up to thee.
1866, John Leander Bishop, “Tanning and the Manufactures of Leather”, in A History of American Manufactures from 1608 to 1860, volume 1, page 429:These legislative efforts to preserve cattle and hides, and to promote the manufacture of Leather, appear to have been rendered necessary by the bad economy of the people, with whom live stock seem to have been little valued. If we may accept the statements of Mr. John Clayton to the Royal Society, in 1688, cattle were much neglected. […] The price of a cow and calf, he says, was 50s., "sight unseen, be she big or little, they are never very curious to examine that point."
1892, “Kentucky Words”, in Dialect Notes, volume 1, American Dialect Society, page 231:To trade knives sight unseen is to swap without seeing each other's knife.
1902, Myrtle Reed, chapter 5, in Lavender and Old Lace:When she wrote, asking me to take charge of her house while she went to Europe, I gladly consented, sight unseen.
2005 August 2, Michiko Kakutani, “They'll Take Manhattan, for a Million or More”, in The New York Times, retrieved 1 Sep. 2008:More than $300 million worth of condominiums were sold in the new Time Warner complex sight unseen while the building was still under construction.