Quid

How to spell quid

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce quid

What does quid mean?

1. nounBritish informal term for one pound sterling.

Quid in a sentence

• The second-hand bike cost him forty quid at the market.

• She lent her flatmate a few quid until payday.

Where does quid come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The money sense of quid, British slang for one pound sterling, is of genuinely uncertain origin, so it should be treated with caution rather than confidence. The most popular suggestion links it to the Latin word quid, meaning 'what' or 'something', perhaps borrowed through the legal phrase quid pro quo, literally 'something for something', which captures the idea of money as a thing exchanged. Another theory traces it to a paper mill at Quidhampton in Wiltshire that supposedly produced banknote stock, though firm evidence is thin. The slang is recorded from the late seventeenth century and has stayed fixed at a single short syllable ever since. The separate sense, a lump of chewing tobacco, is a regional variant of the older word 'cud', the food a cow brings back up to chew. Because the word is so short and phonetically plain, the spelling itself causes little trouble; the interest lies entirely in its murky history.

How the word is built

• quid (single unanalysable root; no prefix or suffix)