Other forms: quoted, quotes, quoting
To quote someone is to repeat their exact words and say whose they are. A reporter quotes the minister's answer, a student drops a line of the poem into an essay, someone at dinner quotes a film for the fourth time.
The noun is the piece of borrowed words itself, and quotes in the plural are also the little marks you put around them. In business a quote is a price offered before the work starts: the builder quoted four thousand for the roof. You quote FROM a book, and you quote someone AS saying something. Said aloud, quote, unquote fences the words off as somebody else's, and hints that the speaker does not accept them. Careful writing prefers quotation for the noun, but quote has won.
1verbquoteTo repeat someone's exact words and say whose they are.
“He quoted the whole speech from memory.”
2verbstateTo state a price for goods or work before it is done.
“The garage quoted four hundred pounds for the repair.”
3nounpassageA passage of someone's exact words, repeated.
“The article ends with a quote from her diary.”
4nounstatedA stated price for a job, given in advance.
“We got three quotes before choosing a builder.”
5nounquotationQuotation marks (in the plural).
“Put the title in quotes so it doesn't read as your own.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
Quote began as bookkeeping. Middle English quoten, from Old French coter and Medieval Latin quotare, meant to mark a book with chapter numbers, from Latin quotus, what number in the sequence, and quot, how many. Numbering a passage became pointing at it as an authority, and by the 1680s it meant copying the exact words. When a trader quotes a price in the 1860s, the word is simply back where it started, in numbers.
Medieval Latin
quotāre
Old French
coter
Middle English
quoten
English, today
quote
Built from
From Middle English quoten, from Old French coter, from Medieval Latin quotāre, from quotus. From Middle English quoten, coten (“to mark (a book) with chapter numbers or marginal references”), from Old French coter, from Medieval Latin quotāre (“to distinguish by numbers, number chapters”), itself from Latin quotus (“which, what number (in sequence)”), from quot (“how many”) and related to quis (“who”). The sense developed via “to give as a reference, to cite as an authority” to “to copy out exact words” (since 1680); the business sense “to state the price of a commodity” (1866) revives the etymological meaning. The noun, in the sense of “quotation,” is attested from 1885; see also usage note, below.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA