What’s up with ‘quid’?
Bread, bones, clams, dough, and moolah: we have a lot of slang terms for money in the English language, to name just a few, er, noteworthy examples. Specific currencies have their own nicknames, too, of course. The Australian and American dollar, for example, often go by ‘buck’, which probably calls back the use of buckskins for trade on the 19th-century American frontier. Among other currencies, the United Kingdom’s sterling pound, meanwhile, is colloquially called a quid. And why is that? For the origin of this monetary moniker, we really shouldn’t be asking why as much as what.
We don’t know for certain the exact origin of quid. Changing quickly in its speech subcultures and often evading the more formal contexts of print, slang is notoriously difficult to trace. The Oxford English Dictionary does find record of quid, though, as early as 1661, citing the pseudonymous Peter Arentine’s Strange Newes from Bartholomew-Fair, or the Wanderer-Whore Discovered: “The fool lost his purse, but we knew how not; for the reckoning being suddenly brought in, his Quids were vanisht.” Historically, a quid nicknamed previous iterations of the sterling pound: the sovereign and the guinea. While these pre-decimal denominations have been discontinued, quid still retains currency.
Some folk etymologies peddle that quid is taken from Quidhampton, a town near Salisbury claimed to have had a mill that produced paper for Great Britain’s first banknotes. This tale, as far as the record is concerned, is a counterfeit. Others have attempted to root quid in the Irish cuid, ‘portion’ or ‘share’, once used by Irish-speaking soldiers in the British army for their compensation. The etymological bank won’t cash this cheque. A quid is also a variant of cud, a lump of chewing tobacco, but its later attestation (1720s) and obscure monetary connections trouble this explanation. Other folk etymologies have even tried to pass off roots in historical squid bartering.
The best account, then, we have for quid looks to the Latin quid, meaning ‘what’, specifically used in the expression quid pro quo, or ‘one thing for another’. Found in English by the 1560s. quid pro quo implies an exchange, hence its application to money and later abbreviation to quid. But perhaps quid’s ‘what’ also implied a sort of ‘wherewithal’ or ‘means’, thus ‘money’. For an analog in other languages, some philologists point us to quibus, French slang for ‘money’, apparently shortened from quibus fiunt omnia (‘by which all things happen’). The Latin quid also shines in the more learned loan, quiddity, originally a philosophical term for the essence of ‘whatness’ of something, later applied to a ‘nicety’ and ‘quip’.
When it comes to etymology, we’re not always so quids in with origins as clean, bright, and shiny as a freshly minted sterling pound. I, for one, though, would wager my quids on the Latin quid.