quote [LME] This comes from medieval Latin quotare, from quot ‘how many’, source also of quota [E17th]. The original sense was ‘mark a book with numbers, or with marginal references’; later it came to mean ‘give a reference by page or chapter’ which led in the late 16th century to ‘cite a text or person’. Quotation (apart from a rare appearance in Middle English meaning ‘a numbering’) dates from the mid 16th century when it was ‘a marginal reference to a passage of text’. Quotient [LME] for the result of dividing one quantity by another comes from Latin quotiens ‘how many times’, from quot.