quarantine from 14th century Venetian quarantena, meaning “40 days”
The word “quarantine” has become part of our daily lives. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, it first crops up in English when Christians describe the place where Jesus fasted for 40 days – written about in 1470 as “a wilderness of quarantine”. This comes from post-classical Latin “quarentena” referring to this same Biblical event. It was also used to describe the 40 days a widow could remain in her deceased husband’s dwelling (!). A further root comes via French “quarantaine”, the collective for 40.
The modern meaning – the isolation imposed on people to prevent the spread of contagious diseases – first appears in English in 1635, probably influenced by the Venetian use of the word (as “quarantena”). The port of Venice could demand that crews on foreign ships stayed on board for 40 days to prevent the plague spreading. In 1663, Samuel Pepys logged a quarantine of 30 days for ships, showing that the word was free from its “40 days” length. In Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year – a chilling book to read today – he writes: “Not a Quarentine of days only, but a Soixantine, not only 40 days but 60 days or longer.” Perhaps we should watch out.
Just before the First World War, nurses noted that a quarantine of 12 days was required after people were exposed to “Asiatic Cholera”. The UK’s pet travel scheme was announced in 2000 to avoid the “need for quarantine”. The word has been used politically to mean blockade or boycott: in 1937, President Roosevelt suggested a collective quarantine of aggressor nations. JFK proposed a quarantine of Cuba in response to the military build-up.
The word entered the world of computers in 1988 as a means of keeping out the “viruses” of the cybersphere and that’s where we are now: struggling to prevent the transmission of a contagious virus.
Governments have a range of words to choose from when creating legislation. The advantage (or disadvantage) of using “quarantine” is its connotations of enforced isolation of animals, cargoes and plagued sailors stretching back 400 years or more.
