The word was recorded in English by 1669, from Latin. The poet John Denham used it to describe a name given to feasts, in his translation of Cicero's dialogue on aging.
Latin gave English the word directly, without passing through French. The Latin adjective meant 'pertaining to a feast', built from a noun for a feast.
Behind that noun lay a Latin verb meaning ‘to live together’. That verb was built from a prefix meaning ‘together’, and a second element meaning ‘to live’, which traces to a Proto-Indo-European root, *gwei-, with the same meaning.
SYMBIOSIS and QUICK share the same root, meaning 'to live'. SYMBIOSIS entered English in the nineteenth century, from Greek, built from a prefix meaning 'together', and the same root, describing two different organisms living closely together for mutual benefit. QUICK is native to Old English, an older word for 'alive', still used today in the phrase 'the quick and the dead'.
By the mid-eighteenth century the word still described the feast, as when Samuel Johnson wrote of reaching happiness by eating without cost. By 1754 the word had also come to describe a person’s own temperament, someone who enjoys festive company, rather than only the occasion. In 1849, Charles Dickens used the word to describe one of his most memorable characters, a man forever cheerful despite his constant debts.
