Word.ws English Dictionary

quail

/kweɪl/

quail verb: to waste away; to fade, to wither.

quail: to waste away; to fade, to wither
Image: Nouhouhouk, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Verb (1)

quail (third-person singular simple present quails, present participle quailing, simple past and past participle quailed)

  1. (intransitive) To waste away; to fade, to wither.
  2. (archaic, transitive) To daunt or frighten (someone).
    • Death dvvels vvithin vs, and if gentle Peace / Diſcend not ſoone, our ſorrovves to ſurceaſe, / Latium (alreadie quaild) vvill be deſtroyd.1594, Robert Garnier, translated by Thomas Kid [i.e., Thomas Kyd], Pompey the Great, His Faire Corneliaes Tragedie: […], London: […] [James Roberts] for Nicholas Ling, published 1595, →OCLC, act I...
    • But when he meant to quaile and shake the Orbe, / He was as ratling Thunder.c. 1606–1607 (date written), William Shakespeare, “The Tragedie of Anthonie and Cleopatra”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard...
  3. (intransitive) To lose heart or courage; to be daunted or fearful.
    • Though George had stopped in his sentence, yet, his blood being up, he was not to be cowed by all the generations of Osborne; rallying instantly, he replied to the bullying look of his father, with another so indicative of resolution and defiance, that the elder man quailed in his turn, and looked...1847 January – 1848 July, William Makepeace Thackeray, “A Quarrel about an Heiress”, in Vanity Fair […], London: Bradbury and Evans […], published 1848, →OCLC, page 183
    • Mr. Utterson had already quailed at the name of Hyde; but when the stick was laid before him, he could doubt no longer: broken and battered as it was, he recognized it for one that he had himself presented many years before to Henry Jekyll.1886 January 5, Robert Louis Stevenson, “The Carew Murder Case”, in Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, London: Longmans, Green, and Co., →OCLC, page 39
  4. (intransitive) Of courage, faith, etc.: to slacken, to give way.
    • Therewith his ſturdie corage ſoone was quayd, / And all his ſences were with ſuddein dread diſmayd.1590, Edmund Spenser, “Book I, Canto VIII”, in The Faerie Queene. […], London: […] [John Wolfe] for William Ponsonbie, →OCLC, stanza 14, page 108
    • "Sir, if you think your name is shamed by me, we had better part," said Mrs. Trevelyan, rising from her chair, and confronting him with a look before which his own almost quailed.1869 May, Anthony Trollope, “Hard Words”, in He Knew He Was Right, volume (please specify |volume=I or II), London: Strahan and Company, […], →OCLC, page 77

Noun

quail (countable and uncountable, plural quails or quail)

  1. Any of various small game birds of the genera Coturnix, Anurophasis or Perdicula in the Old World family Phasianidae or of the New World family Odontophoridae.
    • Quail require little water, so there is no point to putting in a guzzler if there is any permanent water within travel range.1954, Wildlife Review, numbers 75-83, page 44
  2. (uncountable) The meat from this bird eaten as food.
  3. (obsolete) A prostitute.
    • Her's Agamemnon, an honeſt fellow inough and one that loues quailes, but hee has not ſo much braine as eare-wax, […]c. 1602, William Shakespeare, The Famous Historie of Troylus and Cresseid. Excellently Expressing the Beginning of their Loues, with the Conceited Wooing of Pandarus, Prince of Licia, London...

Verb (2)

quail (third-person singular simple present quails, present participle quailing, simple past and past participle quailed)

  1. (obsolete) To curdle or coagulate, as milk does.
    • [Laser is given] to such as haue supped off and drunk quailed milke, that is cluttered within their stomack.1601, Pliny the Elder, translated by Philemon Holland, The Historie of the World: Commonly Called the Naturall Historie of C. Plinius Secundus; translated into English by Philemon Holland, London...

Proper noun capitalized: Quail

Quail

  1. A surname from Scottish Gaelic.

quail meaning in Hindi, Tamil, Urdu and Bengali

quail in Hindi

any of several small game birds
बटेर baṭer, वर्तक vartak

quail in Tamil

any of several small game birds
காடை kāṭai

quail in Urdu

to quail
ڈگمگانا ḍagmagānā

quail in Bengali

any of several small game birds
কোয়েল kōẇel, বটেরা boṭera
More languagesFewer languages
quail in Telugu
కౌజు పిట్ట kauju piṭṭa
quail in Malayalam
കാട kāṭa
quail in Kannada
ಟಿಟ್ಟಿಭ ṭiṭṭibha, ಗವುಜುಗ gavujuga
quail in Punjabi
ਬਟੇਰਾ baṭerā
quail in Sanskrit
वर्तक vartaka, वर्तीर vartīra
quail in Assamese
বঁটা bõta, বঁটা চৰাই bõta sorai
quail in Tagalog
pugo, kutipaw, tiktiko
quail in Arabic
سُمَّان summān, سَلْوَى salwā
quail in Malay
puyuh
quail in Indonesian
puyuh
quail in Persian
بلدرچین belderčin, ورتیج vartij, وشم vošm
quail in Thai
นกกระทา grà-taa
quail in Vietnamese
cút, cun cút
quail in Myanmar
ငုံး ngum:

Examples of quail in a sentence

  • To tell the truth the prospect rather quailed him – wandering about in the gloomy corridors of a nunnery.1978, Lawrence Durrell, Livia: or, Buried Alive: A Novel, London; Boston, Mass.: Faber and Faber; republished in The Avignon Quintet...
  • Stouter hearts than a woman's have quailed in this terrible winter.1904, Seymour S. Tibbals, The Puritans or The Captain of Plymouth: A Comic Opera in Three Acts, [Franklin, Oh.]: Seymour S. Tibbals, →OCLC...
  • His heart quailed before the enormous pyramidal shape.1949 June 8, George Orwell [pseudonym; Eric Arthur Blair], chapter 2, in Nineteen Eighty-Four: A Novel, London: Secker & Warburg, →OCLC...
  • And he commanded his soldiers […] to frighten them with fierce swords, but the hearts of the holy men did not quail, and they were unable to alter their words.1928, E. A. Wallis Budge, transl., The Book of the Saints of the Ethiopian Church[:] A translation of the Ethiopic Synaxarium […] , volume...

All 27 example sentences with quail

Forms of quail

Verb
third-person singular presentquails
present participlequailing
past participlequailed
pastquailed
alternative formqueal
alternative formquele
Noun
pluralquails
pluralquail

Plural of quail: quails or quail

Origin of quail

From Middle English quaylen, from Middle Dutch queilen, quēlen, from Old Dutch *quelan, from Proto-West Germanic *kwelan, from Proto-Germanic *kwelaną (“to suffer”). Doublet of queal.

From Middle English quayle, quaile, quaille, from Anglo-Norman quaille, from Late Latin quaccola (“quail”). (prostitute): So called because the quail was thought to be a very amorous bird.

From Middle English quaylen, qwaylen, from Old French quaillier, coaillier, from Latin coāgulāre. Doublet of coagulate.

Words formed from quail

Phrases with quail

Words that rhyme with quail

48 more rhymesFewer rhymes

Questions about quail

What does quail mean?
Quail means to waste away; to fade, to wither.
What is quail in Hindi?
Quail in Hindi is बटेर (baṭer), वर्तक (vartak). See Quail meaning in Hindi.
How do you use quail in a sentence?
To tell the truth the prospect rather quailed him – wandering about in the gloomy corridors of a nunnery.
What part of speech is quail?
Quail can be a verb, a noun or a proper noun.
How do you pronounce quail?
Quail is pronounced /kweɪl/.
What is the past tense of quail?
The past tense of quail is quailed.

Words near quail in the dictionary

  1. quaichs
  2. Quaid
  3. Quaids
  4. quaigh
  5. quaighs
  6. quail
  7. quail dove
  8. quail doves
  9. quail hawk
  10. quail hawks
  11. Quail Hollow

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: quail (page history and authors); Quail (page history and authors); ڈگمگانا (Urdu) (page history and authors); ಗವುಜುಗ (Kannada) (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-us-quail.ogg, en-au-quail.ogg.

Cite this entry: “quail.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/quail. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.