A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
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quid
A quid is a wad of something held in the mouth and chewed without being swallowed, most often tobacco or a leaf. The related verb is used of horses and other animals: to quid is to chew food, drop it half-processed in a wet ball, and take another mouthful, which is a standard sign of trouble with the teeth. The dropped ball is a quid, too.
Etymology
The word is a variant of cud, the mass a ruminant brings back up to chew again, and both go back to an Old English word for what is chewed. English kept them as two words with different jobs, so a cow chews the cud and a sailor chews a quid, and hardly anybody notices they are the same word in two coats. The money sense is unrelated and its origin is not established.
Notes
Cud-chewing is a considerable piece of engineering. A ruminant ferments plant material in the first chamber of its stomach, brings it back up in portions, chews it a second time to break the fiber further, and swallows it on to be digested properly, and a cow spends around eight hours a day doing it. Watching whether an animal is chewing the cud is one of the first things a stockman checks, because it stops before almost anything else shows.