quine

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See also: Quine

English

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WOTD – 25 June 2025

Pronunciation

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The American logician and philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine in 1980.

Etymology 1

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From Quine, named after the American logician and philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine (1908–2000).

Verb sense 1 (“to append (a text) to a quotation of itself”) was coined by the American cognitive and computer scientist Douglas Hofstadter (born 1945) in his book Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (1979; see the quotation), referring to Quine’s study of indirect self-referencing and in particular Quine’s paradox, the following statement that produces a paradox: “‘Yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation’ yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation.” Hofstadter also referred to the concept of noun sense 1 (“program that produces its own source code as output”) in the book, but termed it a self-rep rather than a quine.[1]

Verb sense 2 (“to deny the importance or significance of (something obviously real or important)”) was independently coined by the American cognitive scientist and philosopher Daniel Dennett (1942–2024) in September 1969 in the original version of his work The Philosophical Lexicon:[2] see the 1987 quotation.

Noun

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quine (plural quines)

  2. (computing) A program that produces its own source code as output.
    • 1996 October 10, John David Regehr, “[A] Quine in C++?”, in comp.lang.misc‎[2] (Usenet):
      This has been bugging me recently. Any quines or pointers to relevant articles or web pages is appreciated. Thanks!
    • 1999 December 14, Gergo Barany, “CC Hack?”, in comp.lang.c‎[3] (Usenet):
      Self-reproducing programs are commonly called quines. Do a web search, it should turn up lots of them. There was also a quine thread here in comp.lang.c just days ago, search deja.com (the thread's title was something about self-printing programs, I think).
    • 2001 July, Clinton Pierce, “Advanced Perl”, in Perl Developer’s Dictionary, Indianapolis, Ind.: Sams Publishing, →ISBN, page 269:
      A quine is a program that can print its own source code. Most quines are notoriously difficult (and fiendish) to write. Perl can cheat, though. :)
    • 2003 May 6, Arthur J. O’Dwyer, “‘A to Z of C’”, in comp.lang.c‎[4] (Usenet):
      Why have a one-page chapter that doesn't say anything? At the least, you should present a quine program written in pure ISO C (I can send you one if you like); […] you might refer the interested reader to Ken Thompson's ACM lecture or to another good source of quine-related puzzles. Quines *are* a lot of fun, but why waste time with trivial ASCII-based examples when there are much more fundamental ways to create them?
    • 2004, David [J.] Darling, “quine”, in The Universal Book of Mathematics: From Abracadabra to Zeno’s Paradoxes, Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley & Sons, →ISBN, page 264, column 2:
      A respectable quine—one that doesn't cheat—is not allowed to do anything as underhand or trivial as seeking the source file on the disk, opening it, and copying (or printing) its contents. Although writing a quine is not always easy, and in fact may seem impossible, it can always be done in any programming language that is Turing complete (see Turing machine), which includes every programming language actually in use.
    • 2005, Simon Cozens, “Fun with Perl”, in Allison Randal, editor, Advanced Perl Programming, 2nd edition, Sebastopol, Calif.: O’Reilly Media, →ISBN, page 260:
      SelfGOL can reproduce itself; it can turn other programs into a quine; it can display a scrolling banner; it plays the Game of Life; and it contains no (ordinary) loops, goto statements, or if statements. Control flow is done, well, interestingly.
    • 2008, Julian Rohrhuber, “Implications of Unfolding”, in Uwe Seifert, Jin-hyun Kim, Anthony Moore, editors, Paradoxes of Interactivity: Perspectives for Media Theory, Human-computer Interaction, and Artistic Investigations, Bielefeld, North Rhine-Westphalia: transcript Verlag, →ISBN, part II (Interplay between Art, Science, and Technology), page 179:
      Yet from a different perspective, it [the semantics of a program] describes the process of producing this very code; in other words, it is because object- and meta-language interrelate that makes a quine difficult; in less reflective programs, where means and ends are more separate, this difficulty is not so obvious.
    • 2009 July 31, Mike Ash, “‘--All You Zombies--’ Title”, in rec.arts.sf.written‎[5] (Usenet):
      Gee, last time I wrote a quine in Lisp it ended up being kind of difficult …
    • 2011, Antoine Amarilli [et al.], “Can Code Polymorphism Limit Information Leakage?”, in Claudio Agostino Ardagna, Jianying Zhou, editors, Information Security Theory and Practice: Security and Privacy of Mobile Devices in Wireless Communication […] (Lecture Notes in Computer Science; 6633)‎[6], Berlin: Springer, →ISBN, archived from the original on 2022-02-06, section 5 (Can Lisp-like Languages Help?), page 14:
      The solution is to make a quine that is also a λ-expression (instead of a list of statements). This is possible, thanks to S-expressions. The way the quine works relies on the fact that its code is a list of statements and that the last one can take a list of the previous ones as arguments.
    • 2012, Thomas Meyer, Christian Tschudin, “Robust Network Services with Distributed Code Rewiring”, in Pietro Lio, Dinesh Verma, editors, Biologically Inspired Networking and Sensing: Algorithms and Architectures, Hershey, Pa.: Medical Information Science Reference, IGI Global, →ISBN, section I (New Biologically Inspired Architectures), page 37, column 1:
      A Quine is a program that prints its own code. Quines exist for any programming language that is Turing complete and it is a common challenge for students to come up with a Quine in their language of choice. The Quine Page provides a comprehensive list of such programs in various languages.
    • 2013 December 8, Brian Hodgert, “‘Mountains will be Mountains’”, in talk.religion.buddhism‎[7] (Usenet):
      Upon receiving a "QUINE" request by the client, the server will first send a 01 OK response, and will then provide the client with a quine in the programming language used to implement the server. This quine does not have to be original.
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Translations
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Verb

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quine (third-person singular simple present quines, present participle quining, simple past and past participle quined) (transitive)

  2. To append (a text) to a quotation of itself.
    • 1979, Douglas R[ichard] Hofstadter, “Air on G’s String”, in Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, New York, N.Y.: Basic Books, →ISBN, part II (EGB), page 435:
      Anyway, now I know how to quine a phrase. It's quite amusing. Here's a quined phrase: / "IS A SENTENCE FRAGMENT" IS A SENTENCE FRAGMENT. / It's silly but all the same I enjoy it. You take a sentence fragment, quine it, and lo and behold, you've made a sentence! A true sentence, in this case.
    • 1984, Douglas R[ichard] Hofstadter, “Analogies and Metaphors to Explain Gödel’s Theorem”, in Douglas M. Campbell, John C. Higgins, editors, Mathematics: People, Problems, Results, Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth International, →ISBN, page 274:
      "Quining" is what I called it in my book. (He certainly didn't call it that!) Quining is an operation that I define on any string of English. […] Here is an example of a quined phrase: "is a sentence with no subject" is a sentence with no subject.
    • 1997, N[athaniel] S. Hellerstein, “Metamathemics”, in Diamond: A Paradox Logic (Series on Knots and Everything; 14), Singapore: World Scientific, →ISBN, part 2 (Advanced Diamond Logic), page 183:
      Diamond arises in Gödelian meta-mathematics. In meta-math, sentences can refer to each other’s provability, and to quining. This yields self-reference: T = “‘is provable when quined’ is provable when quined.” / D = “‘is unprovable when quined’ is unprovable when quined.” […]
    • 2001 October 1, Howard Mirowitz, “Why is L&T in Quotation Marks?”, in rec.music.dylan‎[8] (Usenet):
      In "Love And Theft", [Bob] Dylan quined the love and theft in his songs in the album's title, "Love And Theft". So the subtext, the meaning of the entire album, when preceded by its quotation, its symbol, yields a paradox.
  4. (philosophy) To deny the existence or significance of (something obviously real or important).
    • [1987, Daniel Dennett, “quine, v.”, in Kathleen Atkins [et al.], edited by Daniel Dennett, The Philosophical Lexicon‎[9], 8th edition, Newark, Del.: American Philosophical Association, distributor, →OCLC, archived from the original on 2024-07-10:
      quine. v. (1) To deny resolutely the existence or importance of something real or significant. "Some philosophers have quined classes, and some have even quined physical objects." Occasionally used intr[ansitively], e.g., "You think I quine, sir. I assure you I do not!"]
    • 1993, Howard Margolis, “The Overthrow of Phlogiston: 2”, in Paradigms & Barriers: How Habits of Mind Govern Scientific Beliefs, Chicago, Ill.; London: University of Chicago Press, →ISBN, page 62:
      As with the puzzle of what happens during the combustion of a metal in pure oxygen (the "steel wool" experiment), this result can of course be quined. Taking the phlogistic view, we could say that the calx requires the same phlogiston content as the metal, so of course the amount of water absorbed must be in accord with that.
    • 1999, Elizabeth Pacherie, “Qualia and Representations”, in Denis Fisette, editor, Consciousness and Intentionality: Models and Modalities of Attribution (The Western Ontario Series in Philosophy of Science), Dordrecht, South Holland: Springer Science+Business Media, →DOI, →ISBN, part 2 (Qualia and Perception), page 119:
      They [some philosophers] deny that mental states and events actually possess the qualitative properties attributed to them by qualia friends and, as a consequence, they advocate quining qualia.
    • 2000, Don Ross, “Introduction: The Dennettian Stance”, in Don Ross, Andrew Brook, David Thompson, editors, Dennett’s Philosophy: A Comprehensive Assessment (A Bradford Book), Cambridge, Mass.; London: MIT Press, →ISBN, page 14:
      Qualia are quined not because [Daniel] Dennett imagines that there is nothing it is like to be conscious, but because no clear demarcation can be drawn between representations of qualitative properties and representations of other sorts of states.
    • 2008, Daniel Barnett, “The Private Language Machine and the Evolution of a Medium”, in Movement as Meaning: In Experimental Film (Consciousness, Literature & the Arts; 13), Amsterdam, North Holland; New York, N.Y.: Editions Rodopi, →ISBN, →ISSN, part II (Dynamic and Syntactic Universals), page 114:
      One of the things that [Ludwig] Wittgenstein is most famous for is quining 'private language'. By saying that private languages can't exist Wittgenstein wanted us to recognize the inescapable function of the social fabric in language's work.
    • 2009, Andrew Pessin, “Mental Transparency, Direct Sensation, and the Unity of the Cartesian Mind”, in Jon Miller, editor, Topics in Early Modern Philosophy of Mind (Studies in the History of Philosophy of Mind; 9), Dordrecht, South Holland: Springer, →ISBN, page 34:
      One might object that in this section I’ve not exactly quined Cartesian qualia, since my denial of the reality of phenomenal colour comes at the cost of accepting the "qualitative character" of sensory experience, with which contemporary philosophers, in fact, often identify qualia.
Derived terms
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Translations
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Etymology 2

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PIE word
*pénkʷe

Learned borrowing from Latin quīnī (“five at a time; five together”),[3] a plural form of quīnus (“five at a time; five each”), ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *pénkʷe (“five; hand”).

Adjective

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quine (not comparable)

  1. (botany, obsolete, rare) Of leaves: arranged in whorls of five.
    Coordinate terms: quatern, tern
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References

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  1. ^ See, for example, Douglas R[ichard] Hofstadter (1979) “Self-ref and Self-rep”, in Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, New York, N.Y.: Basic Books, →ISBN, part II (EGB), page 499:
    The preceding program is an elegant example of a self-reproducing program written in a language which was not designed to make the writing of self-reps particularly easy. […] But suppose a language were designed expressly for making self-reps easy to write. […] For example, suppose that the operation of eniuq-ing were a built-in feature of the language, needing no explicit definition (as we assumed PRINT was). Then a teeny self-rep would be this: / ENIUQ [‘ENIUQ’]. / It is very similar to Tortoise’s version of Quine’s version of the Epimenides self-ref, where the verb “to quine” is assumed to be known: / “yields falsehood when quined” yields falsehood when quined.
  2. ^ Daniel Dennett (1987) “Preface to the Eighth Edition”, in Kathleen Atkins [et al.], Daniel Dennett, editor, The Philosophical Lexicon‎[1], 8th edition, Newark, Del.: American Philosophical Association, distributor, →OCLC, archived from the original on 2024-07-10:
    The Lexicon began one night in September of 1969 when I was writing lecture notes and found myself jotting down as a heading “quining intentions”. I saw fit to compose a definition of the verb. In the morning I was ill prepared to lecture, but handed a list of about a dozen definitions together with the Introduction to my colleagues at Irvine.
  3. ^ “quine, adj.”, in OED Online Paid subscription required⁠, Oxford: Oxford University Press, July 2023.

Further reading

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French

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Etymology

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Borrowed from Latin quīnus (“fivefold; five by five”).

Pronunciation

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Noun

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quine m (plural quines)

  1. set of five, group of five (such as the digits on one hand)

Descendants

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  • → English: keno

Further reading

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Latin

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Pronunciation

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Numeral

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quīne

  1. vocative masculine singular of quīnus

Portuguese

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Verb

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quine

  1. inflection of quinar:
    1. first/third-person singular present subjunctive
    2. third-person singular imperative

Scots

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Noun

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quine (plural quines)

  1. Doric Scots form of quean (“young woman, girl”)
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