Quined

Part of speech: verb, adjective

Definitions

1. Describing a program that has been written so that it outputs its own source code exactly, as a self-reproducing quine
2. Referring to code that was constructed to print a copy of itself when it runs, a logic-based self-replicating routine
3. Characterizing a computer program made to reproduce its own text as its only output, in the manner of a quine

Etymology: Douglas Hofstadter coined the verb "quine" in his 1979 book Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, honouring the American logician Willard Van Orman Quine (1908–2000). Quine had studied indirect self-reference, and in particular a paradoxical sentence: "'Yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation' yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation." Hofstadter used the name to describe appending a text to a quotation of itself, the trick at the heart of that paradox. A second sense arrived independently. The American philosopher Daniel Dennett coined the same verb in September 1969, in the original version of his work The Philosophical Lexicon, to mean denying the importance or significance of something obviously real or important. Both senses come from the same surname, so one name ended up carrying two unrelated meanings. The verb "quined" is simply the past tense of "quine" in both of these senses.