Also 6 quinte. [a. F. quint m. (sense 1), or quinte f. (senses 2 and 3):—L. quint-us, -a, -um, ordinal to quinque five.]
1. A tax of one-fifth.
1526. in Dillon, Customs of Pale (1892), 83. He must paye to the kinge the yth pennie of his goods for the quinte.
1852. Th. Ross, trans. Humboldt’s Trav., I. v. 176. The payment of the quint to the officers of the crown.
2. Mus. a. An interval of a fifth.
1865. trans. Spohr’s Autobiog., II. 14. Three ugly quints follow each other.
1887. A. Riley, Athos, App. 406. It is not founded upon the modern system of octaves, but is a succession of similar quints, the final note of each being the first of the ensuing one.
b. (in full quint-stop.) An organ-stop that gives a tone a fifth higher than the normal.
1855. E. J. Hopkins, Organ, xxi. 110. Some [stops] sound g on the C key … Those are called ‘fifth-sounding’ or Quint Stops. Ibid., 117. The Quint on the Pedal is almost invariably composed of stopped pipes.
