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I have a question. The word quite has two meanings, very and not very. How can I distinguish between them?

Lawrence
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husain
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    When an Englishman says your idea are Quite Interesting, you're usually not supposed to know which sense he means. – FumbleFingers Feb 06 '16 at 12:37
  • Can you provide some examples. I would agree that The water is quite hot has a dichotomous meaning depending on context. It could mean "it is much hotter than you would suppose". Or it could simply be that it is part-way to being as hot as it might be. The sense ultimately depends on the listener's prior expectations about the water. – WS2 Feb 06 '16 at 12:37
  • @FumbleFingers Quite! – WS2 Feb 06 '16 at 12:39
  • Examples, examples, examples!!! – Hot Licks Feb 06 '16 at 13:32
  • @HotLicks "Are you hungry?" -- "Uhh, quite."; "I say, I'm quite hungry!" – OJFord Feb 07 '16 at 06:36

2 Answers2

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Welcome to the world of homonyms, homographs and more.

As the comments to your question indicate, context and expectation are the primary ways to identify the meaning of words that can have more than one meaning.

In the extreme, there are even contranyms, words that are their own antonyms. That is, they can mean one thing sometimes and the opposite at other times. Often, there is a common idea to both meanings that remains constant.

For example, consider the verb dust. To Dust the blinds is to remove small particles from the window blinds, but to dust a cake is to add small particles to the cake. The common idea is that you're doing something with small particles (cf. the noun, dust).

As you can see, the broader context is needed for disambiguation.

This is the case also with quite, the word you are asking about. The common idea here is that quite is an intensifier, milder than very, similar to somewhat. For a phrase like that object is quite hot, this translates roughly to the object being somewhat hot. Given the British penchant for understatement, though, the object could be expected to be rather hot, or even very hot depending on who spoke the phrase. How far quite intensifies hot differs from speaker to speaker, so the speaker becomes part of the context needed for disambiguation.

Community
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Lawrence
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  • Also worth noting the further intensifiers 'really', and 'rather'. "I say, it's [[really [rather]] quite] hot!". Understatement affords us really rather quite a few levels of subtlety. – OJFord Feb 07 '16 at 06:39
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As we all know there are two types of English prevalent. * UK English * US English The usage of the word "quite" ,here in your question implies the word being an adverb. Under the British English the word means "fairly". Ex- The trip was quite pleasurable, though some days were exhausting.

Under the American English the word mrans "very" . Ex- Angelina Jolie is quite pretty.

I hope this was helpful.

user4784
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