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English
Alternative forms
Etymology
From sot (“a stupified, stupid, inebriated, addicted, or infatuated person”), and weed.
Noun
sot-weed (countable and uncountable, plural sot-weeds)
- (now rare) tobacco
1708, Ebenezer Cooke, The Sot-weed Factor: or, A Voyage to Maryland. A Satyr. In which is Describ'd The Laws, Government, Courts and Constitutions of the Country, and also the Buildings, Feasts, Frolicks, Entertainments and Drunken Humours of the Inhabitants of that Part of America. In Burlesque Verse., "at the Raven in Pater-Noster-Row", London: D. Bragg:These Sot-weed Planters Crowd the Shoar [more recent explanatory foot-note] Sot-Weed, i. e. the sot making or inebriating weed; a name for tobacco, used at that time. A Sot-weed Factor, was a tobacco agent or supercargo.
2010, Henry Miller, “The Lure of Sotweed: Tobacco and Maryland History”, in Slackwater: Oral Folk History of Southern Maryland, volume 3:the effects of smoking sotweed... Depressions would produce modest efforts to diversify the economy but as soon as tobacco prices rose again, planters returned to “sotweed making”.
2018, Kate Livie, “The Roots of the “Sot Weed””, in The Star Democrat, retrieved 2018-05-19:John Rolfe toiled over his tobacco plants, spending four years perfecting the cultivation and curing of his “sot weed”