Quoth

Part of speech: verb

Pronunciation: /kwəʊθ/

Definitions

1. To recount or state previously uttered words
2. to articulate phrases that have been expressed in prior discourse
3. Used in past or literary contexts to indicate that someone has spoken or stated something previously

Etymology: Quoth is a past tense with no living present form. Its present-tense counterpart would be "quethe", a verb that dropped out of use, so English speakers today meet "quoth" only as a frozen survivor from older English. It descends from Old English "cwæþ", the first and third person past indicative of "cweþan", meaning to say, speak to, address, exhort or admonish. That range of senses shows how broadly the old verb once covered speech, from casual remark to formal address. The Old English form came down through Middle English as "quoth" or "quath", and it became a set phrase in which the speaker was named after it, as in "quoth he" or "quoth she". Its inflection is what makes it odd: the verb appears only in the past, and only with the first and third persons, so it stands apart from the rest of English's verbs. The Proto-Germanic ancestor "kwaþ" carries the same past-tense shape into the older Germanic languages. Despite the similar spelling, "quoth" is unrelated to "quote". The latter comes from Latin "quotare", meaning to mark with numbers, so the two words share a sound but not a source.

Synonyms: said, stated, declared