queue [LME] Think of a long queue of people stretching back from a ticket office or bus stop. It looks a bit like an animal’s tail, and this is the literal meaning of the word, which comes from French and was based on Latin cauda ‘tail’. Queue was originally used as a heraldic term for the tail of an animal. In the 18th and 19th centuries it also referred to a pigtail, sometimes spelt cue, and source of the long thin rod cue [M18th] used in snooker. It came to describe a line of people in the mid 19th century.