quarantine

Etymology

In the sense “period of isolation for a ship suspected of carrying disease”, recorded from the 1660s,^[1] borrowed from Italian quarantina,^[2][3] from Italian quaranta giorni “space of forty days”,^[1] from Italian quaranta (“forty”),^[2][4] from Latin quadrāgintā (“forty”).^[2][3] The name comes from the Venetian policy, first enforced in 1377, of holding ships from plague-stricken countries off port for 40 days.^[1] Merriam-Webster traces the word partly also to French quarantaine.^[5]

An earlier, separate sense goes back to Medieval Latin quarentēna;^[4] as quarentyne (15th century) it named the desert in which Christ fasted for forty days.^[1][4]

References

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