1580 C. Hollyband Treasurie French Tong Foire, thin dung, skurt.

1611 R. Cotgrave Dict. French & Eng. Tongues Foire, squirt, thinne dung; a laske.

1611 R. Cotgrave Dict. French & Eng. Tongues Aller long, to haue a squirt, to squatter out behind.

1641 (title) Taylor's Physicke has purged the Divel; or the Divell has got a Squirt. By Voluntas Ambulatoria.

1828 W. Carr Dial. Craven (ed. 2) Swirt,..a diarrhœa.

1590 C. Lucar Lucarsolace iv. x. 157 A squirt which hath been devised to cast much water upon a burning house.

1643 Seasonable Adv. preventing Fire in Harl. Misc. (Malh.) V. 348 Also it is necessary that every parish should have hooks, ladders, squirts, buckets, and scoops, in readiness, upon any occasion.

1667 in Strype's Surv. London (1754) I. i. xxviii. 291/2 That every Alderman..provide four and twenty buckets and one hand squirt of brass.

a1711 R. Duke in Earl of Roscommon et al. Poems (1717) 516 For once a Squirt was rais'd by Windsor Wall.

1866 C. F. T. Young Fires vi. 69 Fire engines..seem to have been altogether forgotten in the ‘dark ages’, and ‘squirts’ or portable syringes appear to have been the only contrivances in use.

1598 J. Florio Worlde of Wordes Gonfiatoio,..a squirt of brasse that Balloniers vse to blowe their ballones full of winde.

1945 L. R. Gribble Battle Stories of R.A.F. xxiii. 59 To fly the squirts in combat meant the development of a new technique.

1948 N.Y. World-Telegram 30 Dec. 11/7 The plane itself is called a ‘blow torch’, a ‘flame thrower’, a ‘squirt’, [etc.].

1626 F. Bacon Sylua Syluarum §500 The Watring of those Lumps of Dung, with Squirts of an Infusion of the Medicine in Dunged water.

1761 L. Sterne Life Tristram Shandy III. xxviii. 140 How different from the rash jerks, and hare-brain'd squirts thou art wont..to transact it with in other humours,..spurting thy ink about thy table and thy books.

1837 T. Carlyle French Revol. II. v. iii. 292 And now in these new days, such issues do come from a squirt of the pen by some foolish rhyming Réné.

1858 N. Hawthorne Jrnl. 21 Feb. in French & Ital. Notebks. (1980) ii. 99 The water makes but the smallest part—a little squirt or two.

1878 R. L. Stevenson Inland Voy. 78 The rain kept coming in squirts and the wind in squalls.

1878 W. K. Clifford Kinematic in Elem. Dynamic 214 The point ς is called a source of strength μ when the fluid streams out in all directions; when μ is negative, so that the fluid streams inwards, it is called a sink. The whole velocity-system here described may be called a squirt.

1942 P. Brennan et al. Spitfires over Malta i. 28 I gave him a squirt with the scatter guns.

1948 Welsh Rev. Winter 287 There was another squirt of song and then silence.

1978 K. Amis Jake's Thing iv. 34 To be given the choice of two [buses]..was..certainly welcome in the increasing rain and squirts of cold wind.

1968 M. Woodhouse Rock Baby vii. 64 It can't transmit continuously, though, surely... What does it do, transmit in squirts?

1974 ‘J. le Carré’ Tinker, Tailor vi. 50 Irina..boiled down the microdots and played radio for him on a high-speed squirt to beat the listeners.

1753 Chambers's Cycl. Suppl. at Cucumis The wild cucumber, or squirt, called by authors, cucumis asinus, or the ass cucumber.

1859 J. C. Hotten Dict. Slang 100 Squirt, a doctor, or chemist.

1891 in Cent. Dict.