Other forms: quits
To quit is to stop doing something, and most often it means leaving a job by choice. She quit in March. It is informal in British English, where resign is the word on the letter, and entirely ordinary in American English.
The past tense is quit in American English and either quit or quitted in British, which is one of the few places where British English keeps the regular form and American keeps the irregular. It also means to give up a habit — quit smoking — and to close a program: quit the application. Note that quit takes -ing, never to: quit smoking, not quit to smoke. And quitter is a real insult, meaning somebody who gives up when things get hard.
1verbquitTo leave a job by choice.~87%
“He quit after eighteen months.”
2verbstopTo stop doing something, especially a habit.~11%
“She quit smoking on her fortieth birthday.”
3verbcloseTo close a computer program.~2%
“Quit the app and open it again.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 19 sentences found in the wild and placed 18 of them on a sense (1 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
quit is a way of stopping.
Also accepted in games: resign
Latin quietus meant at rest — the same word behind quiet. Old French quitter meant to release somebody from a debt or an obligation, letting them go free. To quit a job is still, at the root, being released from it.
Proto-Indo-European
*kʷyeh₁-
Anglo-Norman
quitter
Middle English
quiten
English, today
quit
Built from
From Middle English quiten, from Anglo-Norman quitter. From Middle English quiten, quyten, from Anglo-Norman quitter, Old French quitter, from quitte (“acquitted, quit”), ultimately from Latin quietus, which itself derives from Proto-Indo-European kʷyéh₁-ti-s, from kʷyeh₁- (“to rest”). a doublet of coy and quite and quiet and quietus. Compare Dutch kwijten (“to quit”), German Low German quitten (“to quit”), German quitten, quittieren, Danish kvitte, Swedish qvitta, kvitta (“to quit, leave, set off”), Icelandic kvitta.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA