Derived words: pašittu ‘obliteration’ (CAD P 256); pāšittu lit. ‘female obliterator’ (a female demon; an illness; a constellation (CAD P 256, AHw. 845).
The Akkadian verb is hard to separate from *pšṭ in Hebrew and Aramaic, for which two basic meanings can be postulated, viz. ‘to spread, to stretch’ and ‘to strip off, to separate’. The semantic aspects of this equation remain rather obscure: the meaning ‘to efface, to erase’ in Akkadian is not exactly the same as ‘to strip off’ in NWS, whereas the internal NWS derivation from ‘to strip off’ to ‘to stretch’ (or vice versa?) is also far from transparent.
May be related to Arb. bsṭ ‘to spread, to expand with an irregular mutation of labials in Arb. (Kogan 2015:477).