Quash comes from Old French quasser, casser ('to annul, break'), from Latin cassare ('to annul'), from cassus ('void, empty'); partly conflated with quassare ('to shatter'). The historical chain includes Old French quasser, Latin cassare, and Latin cassus. The quoted older senses, "to annul, break", "to annul", "void, empty", and "to shatter", supply the semantic anchors for quash. The formation is best read as borrowed: the word quash carries its older form-history into a compact English lexical shape. In present English it is used as a verb, "to reject or void, especially by legal procedure". English derivatives include quashed and quashing; related English forms include squash and quell. The result is a verb whose etymology preserves both the older form and the later English specialization.