quotation

Quotation traces to Medieval Latin quotātiō, from Latin quotāre, and by the 15th century was used in English for an obsolete sense of "quota." The now-familiar sense, a fragment of someone's speech or writing, appears from the 17th century — either continuing that same source or forming freshly from quote + -ation.

The word started out attached to counting or portioning things, as "quota" once did. Only later did it settle into naming a repeated piece of someone else's words, a sense that took over and pushed the older meaning into obsolescence.

It shares its root with "quote" itself, since the modern meaning may simply be quote plus the suffix -ation.