Quaint means charmingly old-fashioned. A quaint village, a quaint custom, quaint but impractical.
It is faint praise and slightly patronising: calling something quaint says it is charming because it is out of date, which is not quite the compliment it sounds. It is used constantly about English villages and about other people's traditions. Note that quaint once meant clever, skilful and elegant, with no reference to age at all — Chaucer uses it that way — and the drift to charming obsolescence took about four centuries.
1adjectivequaintCharmingly old-fashioned.
“We stayed in a quaint little cottage with a thatched roof.”
quaint is a quality of old-fashioned charm.
Old French cointe meant clever or knowing, from Latin cognitus, known. Quaint meant ingenious for centuries, then curious, and finally charmingly outdated, which is a slow slide from praise to condescension.
Proto-Indo-European
*ǵneh₃-
Latin
cognitus
Old French
cointe — pretty, clever, knowing
Anglo-Norman
cointe
Middle English
queynte
English, today
quaint
Built from
From Middle English queynte, quoynte, from Anglo-Norman cointe, queinte and Old French cointe (“pretty, clever, knowing”), from Latin cognitus, past participle of cognōscō (“to know”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA