Other forms: qualities
Quality is how good or bad something is made. A coat whose seams hold for ten years is good quality; a charger that dies in a month is poor quality.
Put quality straight in front of a noun and it means good all by itself: quality time with your children, a quality player, quality ingredients. A quality is also a feature of someone's character — patience is the quality the job really needs, and 'she has the qualities we are looking for' is what the interviewer writes down. The fixed phrases run deep: quality control, quality of life, high quality, top quality, poor quality. Grammar trap: it is uncountable for standard ('the quality of the sound') and countable for a trait ('her best quality'), and the adjective form takes a hyphen — good-quality food, not 'a good quality food'.
1nounqualityHow good or bad something is; the standard it reaches.~70%
“The sound quality on the recording is poor.”
2nountraitA feature of someone's character, or of a thing.~12%
“Patience is the one quality the job really needs.”
synonyms: trait, attribute, characteristic
3adjectivehighOf a high standard (used before a noun).~18%
“They only use quality ingredients.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 17 sentences found in the wild and placed 17 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Latin quālitās was invented on purpose. Cicero built it from quālis, 'of what kind', to translate the Greek poiotēs, which Plato had coined the same way from poios, 'of what sort'. So quality began as a philosopher's tool for asking what kind of thing something is, and only later came to mean how good it is.
Proto-Indo-European
*kʷ-
Proto-Indo-European
*kʷo- — who, how
Latin
quālitās
Old French
qualité
Middle English
qualite
English, today
quality
Built from
From Middle English qualite, from Old French qualité, from Latin quālitās, from quālis (“of what kind”), from Proto-Indo-European kʷo- (“who, how”). Cicero coined qualitas as a calque to translate the Ancient Greek - word ποιότης (“quality”), coined by Plato from ποῖος (“of what nature, of what kind”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA