Citations:root

unsorted

					1843
ME «	15th c.	16th c.	17th c.	18th c.	19th c.	20th c.	21st c.

• 1843, Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol:

  This was not addressed to Scrooge, or to any one whom he could see, but it produced an immediate effect. For again Scrooge saw himself. He was older now; a man in the prime of life. His face had not the harsh and rigid lines of later years; but it had begun to wear the signs of care and avarice. There was an eager, greedy, restless motion in the eye, which showed the passion that had taken root, and where the shadow of the growing tree would fall.

to pull up by the roots

• 1845, The Farmer's Magazine, page 154:

  […] the first thing a farmer had to do was to root the weeds out of his field, and the prejudices out of his heart […]

• 1915, The Garden Magazine, page 267:

  Since many of the biennial weeds develop a long underground root, difficult to root up, it is necessary to try other ...

• 2014, Kenneth Muir, The Sources of Shakespeare's Plays, Routledge (→ISBN)

  He speaks of 'improfytable weedes' as the gardener proposes to root away the weeds 'which without profit suck/The soil's fertility'

• 2017, William Bacon Stevens, The Parables of the New Testament, Bible Study Books (→ISBN)

  While the eye of God beholds with unerring certainty, who are the weeds and who are the wheat — man does not. And were it left to him to root up the weeds, he might leave many stalks of weeds, supposing them to be genuine wheat — and ...