quick
/kwɪk
/- They are a fine team with very fast and quick forwards and they are pressing for the top place in the group and if they beat us they will do that.
- With electric gates which can be operated from either end of the pit cows make a quick entry and a fast exit.
- While being quick and fast, those involved in the relief and rescue work should maintain their temper, he noted.
Synonyms
- Bails was tired but met for a quick drink after work.
- We were supposed to be having ‘a quick drink’, but it ended up being dinner for about eight and the bar actually ran out of wine.
- The set was two and a half hours of music with a twenty-minute interval for drinks and some quick reprogramming of the lights and video projectors.
Synonyms
- However if we want a quick result on a short session they are ideal.
- The result is quick response both around town and on the open road, plus levels of fuel efficiency and economy that rate at the top of the class.
- Low-intensity warfare of this kind does not bring quick results and much of the work is low-key, repetitive and painstaking.
Synonyms
- But in private, it was clear that this guy was very smart, very quick to learn.
- With its quick intelligence, it has no trouble learning its name and how to use a litter box.
- Joseph early in life learned that quick wit would get him through.
Synonyms
- Making money in this segment will require careful management and a quick eye on micro-trends.
- He signaled secretly to his gang, but the cold man's quick eye caught everything.
- You can be rather selfish, though, and a partner needs to be able to deal with your quick temper and impulsive tantrums.
- Now I realized that it was his cold anger that I feared, and not his quick temper.
- Exxon and Shell say if we don't do something quick the 2004 convention sponsorship deal is off.
- So get your ducks quick as they are flying out of the place.
- How quick we have forgotten the sacrifice demanded of those whose homes and communities that stood in the way of the inner relief folly.
- This will prevent the quick from growing too long and prevent the nail from bleeding.
- As she packed, I saw her hands and her once beautiful nails were bitten to the quick.
- Its implications cut to the quick of the British constitution.
- It neutralises the whining about failing to address the issue because it cuts to the quick.
- They will die as you died, in the footsteps of the dead that were quick.
- From the salvation of the dead we move to the healing of the quick.
- This law renders willful killing of an unborn ‘quick’ child by any injury to the mother of the child to be manslaughter.
- However, there is enough help for the seamers to persuade both teams to play three frontline quicks.
- If Bridgetown's Kensington Oval was a fortress for the Caribbean quicks of the 1970s and 80s, Eden Park became the impenetrable battlefield of the lack-of-pace New Zealand attack in the World Cup.
Phrases
be quick off the mark
cut someone to the quick
(as) quick as a flash
quick and dirty
quick on the draw
a quick one
quick with child
Origin
Old English cwic, cwicu 'alive, animated, alert', of Germanic origin; related to Dutch kwiek 'sprightly' and German keck 'saucy', from an Indo-European root shared by Latin vivus 'alive' and Greek bios, zōē 'life'.
The original meaning of quick in Old English was ‘living’ or ‘alive’, contrasting with something dead or inanimate. This early sense still survives in the expression the quick and the dead, meaning ‘the living and the dead’, which comes from the Apostles' Creed in the Book of Common Prayer (1662): ‘From thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead.’ Quicksand (Old English) is so called because it moves—and swallows things up—as if it were alive. The original ‘alive’ sense of quick also led to the use of the word to refer to the soft, tender flesh below the growing part of a fingernail or hoof. Nervous people might bite their nails right down ‘to the quick’. This area is well supplied with nerves and is very sensitive to touch or injury (and so seems more ‘alive’ than other parts of the skin). So to cut someone to the quick is to upset them very much by saying or doing something hurtful. It was a simple step in the word's history to go from ‘alive’ to senses such as ‘lively’ and ‘vigorous’ and, from the late 16th century, ‘fast’. Mercury was formerly known as quicksilver—the silver substance moves in such an unpredictable way that it seems to be alive.