Etymologically
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English

quaint

History

Pronunciation

  • IPA: /kweɪnt/[1]

Etymology

Recorded from c. 1200 as cointe, cwointe;[2] the modern spelling dates from the early 14th century.[2] From Middle English queinte,[3][4] borrowed from Old French cointe (“knowledgeable, clever; elegant; proud”), queinte,[2][4] from Latin cognitus (“known”), past participle of Latin cognōscere (“to get to know”).[5][3][2] Compare cognition.[5][3]

Earliest recorded meaning

“Cunning, artful, ingenious”, in both good and bad senses;[2] of persons, “wise, skilled, clever”.[6][3]

Semantic evolution

The word moved from cleverness to the things cleverness produces, “elaborate, skilfully made” (c. 1300), and then to “strange, fanciful, odd” (mid-14th century).[2][6] All the old senses are now archaic or obsolete;[2] Etymonline suggests that the mixture of good and bad senses may have contributed to this.[2] The word became rare after about 1700, then recovered in the sense “unusual or old-fashioned but charming”.[2]

Timeline

  • c. 1200 – “cunning, artful, ingenious; proud”.[2][6]
  • c. 1290 – of things, “ingeniously contrived; elaborate”.[6]
  • 14th century – of things and dress, “beautiful, fine, elegant”.[6]
  • mid-14th century – “strange, fanciful, odd”.[2]
  • 1782 – “unusual or old-fashioned but charming”; the OED's first quotation is from 1795.[2][6]

Modern meaning

Adjective

  1. Attractively unusual or old-fashioned; picturesque.[5][3][4][1]
  2. Strange or unusual in an interesting or amusing way.[5][3][4][1]
  3. (obsolete) Skilled, clever; skilfully made.[3][4]

Word family

  • quaintly
  • quaintness

Related words

  • cognition, cognizance

References

  1. [1] [2] [3] Wiktionary, the free dictionary, https://en.wiktionary.org
  2. [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [12] Harper, Douglas, Online Etymology Dictionary, https://www.etymonline.com
  3. [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, Springfield, Mass.: Merriam-Webster
  4. [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, New York: Random House
  5. [1] [2] [3] [4] The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Boston: Houghton Mifflin
  6. [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] Simpson, J. A.; Weiner, E. S. C., eds. (1989), The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., Oxford: Clarendon Press

Last edited on 5 October 2026.