Quoth
verb ·Rare ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 simple past of quethe; said archaic, defective, form-of, literary, past
"Tell me what thy lordly name is on the Night's Plutonian shore! / Quoth the raven, "Nevermore.""
- 2 To say. archaic, auxiliary, defective, modal, nonstandard
"But the Healing-one stood before the under-king, and the under-king arraigned him, quothing, thou art the king of the Jews? the Healing-one quoths him, thou quoths."
Example
More examples""Never kick a sore toe against a stone wall," quoth Dick Prescott, and passed on into the school building."
Etymology
From Middle English quoth, quath, from Old English cwæþ (first and third person past indicative of cweþan (“to say, speak to, address, exhort, admonish”)), from Proto-Germanic *kwaþ (first and third person past indicative of Proto-Germanic *kweþaną (“to say”)). Unrelated to quote.
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.