A-to-Z Challenge: Quit

The best part of doing etymology as my theme? It’s really easy to come up with words for the hard letters. Well, mostly.

Today we have: quit.

Quit first showed up in the early thirteenth century, where it meant repay, like a debt. Quit has actually had a lot of meanings over the years. In the mid-thirteenth century, it meant to reward, while in the late fourteenth century it meant to take revenge or retort. Then in the fourteenth century, before we had acquit, quit meant to plead not guilty. Later on, in the fifteenth century, quit meant leave or depart (if you’ve ever read any Shakespeare, you’ve heard it used that way) and then mid-century, it also meant relinquish. It wasn’t until the middle of the seventeenth century that people started using it as “stop doing something”. There’s no real reason why quit changed definitions so many times, but most of the meanings had something to do with being free of something. That’s because quit comes from the Old French quiter, establish innocence or simply release. Quiter comes from another Old French word, quitte, which means free or clear. It comes from the Medieval Latin quitus and classical Latin quietus, which means quit, calm, or sleeping. And if you think that word looks and sounds an awful lot like quiet, there’s a reason.

Sources

Online Etymology Dictionary

Omniglot

University of Texas at Austin Linguistic Research Center

Google Translate

Dictionary of Medieval Latin