quotation
Pluralquotations
- 1A piece of someone's spoken or written expression, such as a line from literature or a famous speech, repeated by another person.
The article opened with a quotation from Lincoln's second inaugural address.
Her essay was peppered with quotations from nineteenth-century novels.
Note
Where the word's modern life begins: words carried over from one speaker to another enter the record in the 17th century, and the origin is uncertain. The sense may have grown out of the older word for a share or quota, or been formed afresh from the verb quote plus -ation. Citation is the more formal synonym. Quote, the clipped noun, is what most people say aloud and write informally.
- 2
- 3The act of repeating another person's words or of reproducing a passage from some other source.
Extensive quotation from the novel pushed the review past fair-use limits.
Accurate quotation matters more in journalism than elegant paraphrase.
Similarcitation
Note
Here the word names the practice rather than the piece. It is uncountable, so one writes of endless quotation, or calls quotation an art, as Henry Walcott Boynton did in The Atlantic Monthly in 1905. It usually takes of (quotation of texts, quotation of melodies) and reaches beyond words: in music it means borrowing an existing tune. Made countable, a quotation becomes the quoted fragment itself. Citation is the closest synonym.
- 4The act of stating or setting the price at which something will be bought, sold, or done.
Quotation of fares is handled automatically by the airline's booking system.
Company policy requires written quotation before any contract is signed.
Similarpricing, costing, estimation
Less common meaning
- 5A share or allotted portion; the part of a whole that falls to each person or group.
Note
The oldest meaning of the word, in use from the 15th century, came from Medieval Latin quotātiō, from quotāre. It named the portion assigned to each party, such as a parish's levy of men or a householder's part of a tax, and it is now obsolete. Modern writing uses quota or share. In older texts, read it as an allotment, not a citation. The sense of words repeated from another arrived two centuries later, possibly from this one.
Practice
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Origin
The obsolete sense "quota" comes from Medieval Latin quotātiō, from Latin quotāre, and is recorded from the 15th century. The sense "a fragment of verbal expression," recorded from the 17th century, may derive from this source or else from the verb quote plus -ation.