ppl. a. Also 6 solyed, sully’d. [f. SULLY v. + -ED1.] Soiled, polluted (lit. and fig.); † made gloomy or dull.
1571. [implied in SULLIEDNESS].
c. 1600. Shaks., Sonn., xv. To change your day of youth to sullied night.
1612. Drayton, Poly-olb., x. 194. Her sullied face.
1683. Tryon, Way to Health, 320. A loathsomely sullied Soul, and an indisposed distempered Body.
1695. A. Telfair, New Confut. Sadd. (1696), 7. Seven small Bones … wrapp’d up in a piece of old sullied Paper.
1734. trans. Rollin’s Anc. Hist., XV. viii. (1827), VI. 132. The moon … appeared afterwards quite sullied and as it were tinged with blood.
1824. Scott, Redgauntlet, ch. xiii. He wore a smart hanger and a pair of pistols in a sullied sword-belt.
1870. Dickens, E. Drood, i. The choir are getting on their sullied white robes.
1889. R. Bridges, Growth of Love, lii. Let the true Muse rewrite her sullied page.
b. Sullied white, dirty white.
1681. Lond. Gaz., No. 1676/4. A very large Irish Greyhound being of a sullied White, with some pale yellowish spots.
1817. Stephens, in Shaw’s Gen. Zool., X. II. 493. The under parts of the body sullied white: the tail greenish black.
Hence † Sulliedness, defilement.
1571. Golding, Calvin on Ps. lxviii. 15. Although the land were covered with solyednesse through the troublous invasion of the enemies: yit … it recovered hir whitenesse, so as it became as whyte as snowe.
