To make drunk or foolish; to stupefy with alcohol or infatuation.
From 'be-' (causative prefix) plus 'sot' (a drunkard, from Old French 'sot,' meaning foolish, possibly from Germanic roots). The verb means to cause someone to become like a sot.
Shakespeare and his contemporaries used 'besot' to describe how love and alcohol both make people foolish—the word conflates two kinds of intoxication, showing how our ancestors saw similar effects!
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