quash
pronunciation
How to pronounce quash in British English:
UK [kwɒʃ]
How to pronounce quash in American English:
US [kwɑʃ]
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- Verb:
- put down by force or intimidation
- declare invalid
Word Origin
- quash
- quash: [14] Quash goes back ultimately to Latin quatere ‘shake’ (source also of English rescue [14], which etymologically means ‘shake off, drive away’, and of concussion and percussion). From it evolved quassāre ‘shake to pieces, break’, which passed into Old French as quasser (its modern descendant is casser, from which English gets cashier ‘dismiss from the army’). English took quasser over as quash. Squash [16] comes ultimately from the Vulgar Latin derivative *exquassāre.=> concussion, percussion, rescue, squash
- quash (v.)
- "to make void, annul," early 14c., from Old French quasser, casser "to annul, declare void," and directly from Medieval Latin quassare, alteration of Late Latin cassare, from cassus "null, void, empty" (see caste (n.)). Meaning "to break, crush," is early 14c., from Old French quasser, casser "to break, smash, injure, harm, weaken," from Latin quassare "to shatter," frequentative of quatere (past participle quassus) "to shake," from PIE root *kwet- "to shake" (cognates: Greek passein "to sprinkle," Lithuanian kuteti "to shake up," Old Saxon skuddian "to move violently," German schütteln "to shake," Old English scudan "to hasten"). The words have influenced each other in form and sense since Medieval Latin and now are somewhat grown together. Related: Quashed; quashing.
Example
- 1. In bahrain , a saudi-led military intervention helped quash the protests in march .
- 2. With four weeks of political limbo ahead in greece , the short-term task is to try to quash any runs before the poll .
- 3. Not until march did a judge quash a lawsuit that would have prevented the airport from signing deals with any other shops or restaurants .
- 4. Even that did not entirely quash rumours that he may use the anniversary on august 6th of the atomic bombing of hiroshima to make a dramatic anti-nuclear gesture .
- 5. Everyone has a relative who died in 1982 when hafez assad , the former president , killed tens of thousands in an effort to quash an islamist uprising .