Quarantine

Part of speech: noun, verb

Pronunciation: /ˈkwɔɹ.ən.tin/

Definitions

1. A period of isolation imposed on people, animals, or goods to prevent the spread of disease or pests
2. A mandatory period of confinement or separation applied to potentially infected persons, animals, or contaminated materials to prevent transmission of disease or infestation
3. The enforced isolation of suspected or confirmed carriers of illness and their belongings to stop the spread of contagion to the general population

Etymology: In 1377 the city council of Ragusa, the Adriatic port now called Dubrovnik, ordered that ships arriving from plague-stricken places wait thirty days before anyone could come ashore. Within a few generations, in Ragusa and in Venice, the standard wait had become forty days. Why forty is uncertain, but the number carried strong religious weight. Forty was the length of the Flood, of Moses on Sinai, and of Christ's fast in the wilderness, and Christians already kept forty days of Lent each year. Some also link it to medical ideas about how long an acute illness takes to show itself. Behind it all is Latin "quadrāgintā," "four tens." Late Latin probably shortened it to "*quaranta," and a suffix for counting groups produced Medieval Latin "quarentena" and "quarentīna," "a forty-day period," a common name for Lent. Italian "quarantina," French and Norman "quarenteine," and Middle English "quarentine" all descend from it. In fifteenth-century English the word could mean the wilderness where Christ fasted. English law also used it for a widow's forty days. Magna Carta allowed a widow to stay in her late husband's house for forty days after his death, and lawyers later called that right her quarantine. The isolation of ships, and later of travellers and the sick, took its name from the Italian ports. Because the wait came to vary, the number dropped out of the meaning. An isolation order can now last a week or a fortnight and still keep the forty-day name. The word also had a political career. In medieval France, edicts of Louis IX were associated with the "quarantaine," a forty-day cooling-off period before an injured family could take revenge, and English historians copied the term. In October 1937 Franklin Roosevelt gave his "Quarantine Speech" in Chicago, proposing that aggressor nations be isolated like carriers of an epidemic. In 1962 John F. Kennedy called the American naval cordon around Cuba a "quarantine" rather than a blockade. The choice was deliberate. Under international law a blockade is an act of war, and the gentler word sounded like a precaution.

Synonyms: isolation, seclusion, separation

Antonyms: integration, association