quarantine
Pluralquarantines
Verbquarantines, quarantining, quarantined
Pluralquarantines
Formsquarantines, quarantining, quarantined
- 1A period or state of keeping people, livestock, or plants isolated from others to prevent a contagious disease from spreading.
Travelers arriving from the affected region were placed in quarantine on arrival.
The newly imported cattle remained in quarantine while inspectors checked for disease.
Similarisolation, confinement, segregation
Note
The general sense outgrew its own number early. Samuel Pepys noted in 1663 that ships were made to perform their quarantine for thirty days, "contrary to the import of the word," since it now signified "the thing, not the time." The phrase perform a quarantine survives in older prose. Today people and animals are put in quarantine, and the length is whatever the disease requires.
- 2To place a person, animal, or plant in isolation in order to prevent a contagious disease from spreading.
Health officials moved quickly to quarantine everyone who had contact with the carrier.
Port authorities quarantined the ship until its crew could be cleared.
Similarisolate, segregate, confine, sequester
Note
The transitive verb takes whole ships and even countries as its object, not only people. In 1866 The Times set it beside the noun phrase it can replace: placing a quarantine on Spain, quarantining Morocco. It also works freely in the passive, as in a captain's fear "of being quarantined at the next port." Ports, health officials and governments are its natural subjects.
- 3To enter or remain in isolation, especially by one's own choice, in order to avoid catching an epidemic disease.
Thousands of people decided to quarantine voluntarily as the outbreak worsened.
She quarantined for two weeks before visiting her elderly grandmother.
Similarisolate, self-isolate
Note
The intransitive verb drops the object that quarantine themselves still carries: travelers simply quarantine for 14 days. The use is older than recent pandemics suggest. In 1928 the Daily News expected the liner Mauretania to "quarantine" at New York, still marking the verb as a novelty. It covers animals too, as when dogs had to quarantine for six months in England.
- 4A comparable period or state of strictly enforced or self-imposed detention or isolation.
The writer retreated into a self-imposed quarantine to finish her novel, seeing no one for weeks.
After the scandal, the firm kept the executive in a kind of professional quarantine.
Similarisolation, seclusion, exile, confinement
Note
In the figurative stretch, isolation needs no disease at all. Writing in 1816, Lord Byron wanted to put "family events" under quarantine. What he kept off limits was a subject, not a person. The phrases under quarantine and in quarantine carry over unchanged from the medical sense. The figure works best when the isolation is deliberate and strictly kept.
- 5A station or facility where people, animals, or goods are held in isolation to prevent the spread of contagious disease.
Arriving vessels were anchored off the quarantine until inspectors declared the crews healthy.
The imported horses spent a month in the quarantine before being released to their owners.
Note
A place rather than a time: the station itself, also called a lazaret. Reginald Heber's journal of 1806 describes locals bringing grain "to the quarantine" to barter with the Cossacks for salt. With the definite article and a preposition of place (to, at, off the quarantine), it reads as a building or anchorage. Without them, readers hear the state of isolation.
- 6The isolation of a program, drive, or computer from the rest of a network to limit the damage caused by a bug or computer virus.
The security software moved the suspicious attachment into quarantine before it could execute.
Administrators kept the infected server in quarantine while they traced the source of the breach.
Similarisolation
Note
Security software made the old word routine. Suspect files are moved into quarantine and held there, uncountable and spatial, though a single isolation can also be a quarantine. By 1988 InfoWorld already used it before another noun, a "quarantine" program for testing suspect software. A year later the American Banker warned that a quarantine can be futile against a virus timed to activate later.
- 7A file, drive, or computer that has been isolated from the rest of a system to keep a possible threat from spreading.
The analyst opened each quarantine to determine whether it was genuinely malicious or a false positive.
Most of the quarantines turned out to be harmless files wrongly flagged by the scanner.
Note
The concrete counterpart of the act of isolating: the isolated item itself, countable, with the plural quarantines. In everyday software prose the line blurs into a place. A message "stays in quarantine" much as a ship once waited at the isolation station. Use the count noun for the isolated items themselves, and the bare phrase in quarantine for their state.
- 8An action by which one country seeks to isolate another, such as a trade blockade or the suspension of diplomatic relations.
The president announced a naval quarantine to cut off arms shipments to the island.
Allied governments imposed a diplomatic quarantine, recalling their ambassadors and freezing trade.
Similarblockade, embargo, isolation
Note
Politics borrowed the medical word to treat a hostile state as a source of contagion. President Roosevelt in 1937 urged a collective "quarantine" of aggressor nations instead of neutrality, and John Fitzgerald Kennedy in 1962 announced "a strict quarantine" on offensive weapons bound for Cuba. It takes of for the country isolated and on for the goods stopped, which keeps it close to the disease-control meaning.
- 9To set apart or isolate someone or something from the rest, in a general sense.
The committee chose to quarantine the disputed clause and debate it separately.
She quarantined the damaged files in a separate folder so they would not interfere with her work.
Similarisolate, separate, segregate, sequester
Note
A vivid stand-in for isolate that keeps a hint of contagion: whatever is set apart might spread trouble. Washington Irving was already playing with it in 1804, fearing he would be "detained, Quarantined, smoaked & vinegard." The word can also be chosen for its mildness. J.F.K. "quarantined" Cuba rather than blockading it, to avoid needless escalation, the same choice behind the diplomatic noun.
- 10To restrict or limit the scope, movement, or use of something.
The policy quarantines public funds to approved projects, blocking any other use.
Lawmakers moved to quarantine the program's budget so it could not grow beyond the cap.
Similarrestrict
Note
Here isolation tips into exclusion. The object is often the party shut out: in E.H. Grubb's Potato (c. 1912), a parliament "quarantined Great Britain against sending any potatoes" to the island. A writer in Chamber's Edinburgh Journal of 1850 asks whether a moral taint "quarantined my entrance" into a circle. In the against + -ing frame, the -ing verb names what is forbidden.
- 11A period lasting forty days.
By custom the penitents spent a quarantine in fasting, the full forty days before Easter.
The agreement bound both sides for a quarantine, after which the terms could be renegotiated.
Note
The arithmetic at the root of the word: Latin quadrāgintā, "forty," became Medieval Latin quarentena, which already meant both a forty-day period and Lent. It passed through Italian quarantina and French quarenteine before reaching Middle English as quarentine. Plague isolation and quarantined computer files both descend from this plain count of days. Used as a bare span of time, it needs context, or readers will hear isolation instead.
- 12The forty-day period of isolation required from 1448 at Venice's lazaret, and under similar rules elsewhere, to prevent fresh outbreaks of bubonic plague.
Merchant vessels reaching the lagoon were made to ride out the quarantine before trading.
The captain resented the quarantine, forty idle days while plague was suspected aboard.
Note
Here the forty days and the isolation first meet. Venice's lazaret held arrivals for that term from 1448, and other places copied the rule. The count of days named the practice, and the practice is what the word later came to mean. It belongs to histories of plague and shipping, where "the quarantine" still means exactly forty days.
- 13To impose isolation measures or establish regulations requiring detention against contagious disease.
Fearing the spreading fever, the magistrates resolved to quarantine without delay.
It has just been announced that Norfolk, Va., and Holly Springs, Miss., have quarantined against Memphis.
1879, The TimesNote
An obsolete intransitive use whose subject is a town or authority, with the target introduced by against. In 1879 The Times reported that Norfolk and Holly Springs "have quarantined against Memphis." Modern readers would take a bare intransitive quarantine as isolating oneself. In present-day writing, say impose a quarantine on or against instead.
- 14The forty-day period during which a widow had the right to remain in her late husband's home while her dower was collected and returned.
The court upheld the widow's quarantine, allowing her to remain in the manor while her dower was assessed.
Querentyne is where a man dyeth seisyd of a maner place and other landis where of the wyfe ought to be indowed, than the woman shall hold the maner place by .xl. days within which tyme her dower shalbe to her assyned.
c. 1523, John Rastell, Exposiciones Terminorum Legum AnglorumNote
A widow's right in old English property law, set out around 1523 in John Rastell's Exposiciones Terminorum Legum Anglorum under the spelling querentyne. When a man died holding a manor, his wife kept the manor house for forty days while her dower was assigned. Use it only when writing about legal history, alongside terms like dower and seisin.
- 15A forty-day period the French king imposed on feuding nobles, during which they were forbidden to seek revenge or continue fighting.
The crown imposed a quarantine on the feuding barons, forbidding any blow for forty days.
Forty days, called the King's quarantain, were allowed the friends or relations of a principal in a private war to grant or find security.
1818, Alexander Ranken, The History of FranceSimilartruce
Note
A royal truce of medieval France. Ephraim Chambers's Cyclopaedia (1728) calls it the "Quarantain of the King" and credits it to S. Louis. Alexander Ranken's The History of France (1818) calls it the King's quarantain: forty days for a feuding lord's kin to grant or find security. It appears only in historical writing, usually tied to the king by that possessive and in that older spelling.
- 16Alternative letter-case form of Quarantine.
By yonde ys a wyldernys of quarentyne, Wher Cryst wyth fastyng hys body dyd pyne; In that holy place, as we rede, The deuyl wold had of stonys bred.
c. 1470, William Wey, The ItinerariesNote
A place name, not a span of time: the Mount of Temptation near Jericho, where Christ was held to have fasted forty days. William Wey's The Itineraries (c. 1470) speaks of "a wyldernys of quarentyne." The lowercase spelling is obsolete, so write Quarantine with a capital, and even that is dated beside Mount of Temptation. The name grows from the same count as the forty-day period.
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Origin
It comes from Medieval Latin quarentena, meaning a 40-day period (also used for Lent), and reached English through Middle English, Norman, French, and Italian forms. Ultimately it goes back to Latin quadrāgintā, meaning "forty."