Contextualizebeta

quote unquote

adj
/kwəʊ̯t ʌn.kwəʊ̯t/UK

Etymology

From quote + unquote, a spoken equivalent of air quotes, used to express satire, sarcasm, irony or euphemism, analogous to scare quotes in print.

  1. derived from quotus — “which, what number (in sequence)”
  2. derived from quotāre — “to distinguish by numbers, number chapters”
  3. derived from coter
  4. inherited from quoten
  5. prefixed as unquote — “un + quote”
  6. compounded as quote unquote — “quote + unquote”

Definitions

  1. Emphasizes the following (or sometimes preceding) word or phrase for irony, or marks it…

    Emphasizes the following (or sometimes preceding) word or phrase for irony, or marks it as not the normal sense of the term.

    • Maybe you should ask your quote unquote friend what happened to the money.
    • `We're a young quote-unquote club. [...] In time, it will become a club.'
    • “Brandishing weapons and leaning into gun culture is viewed as revolutionary, and by revolutionary I mean, in their minds, the most virtuous sense, as defenders of quote unquote America,” he says.

  2. Used in spoken language to delimit a quotation in the same function as quotation marks.

    • Adam Smith claimed that a capitalist is, quote, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention, unquote.
    • So you quote love unquote me / Well, stranger things have come to be

The neighborhood

Vish — recursive loop

No curated loop yet for quote unquote. Loops are being traced one word at a time while the ingestion pipeline matures.

sense glosses and etymology drawn from English Wiktionary · source · CC-BY-SA