quinte

Quinte is a term used in multiple, distinct contexts, including geography, music, and gaming, with no single universal meaning.

In geography, Quinte refers to a region in southeastern Ontario, Canada, centered around the Bay of Quinte on Lake Ontario. The region encompasses parts of Hastings County and Prince Edward County and includes communities such as Belleville and Quinte West. The name is tied to the bay it surrounds, a designation that appears in regional planning and tourism contexts. The etymology of the Bay of Quinte’s name is historical and not definitively established, with various origins proposed by historians and local sources.

In music theory, quinte is the term used in some languages for the interval known in English as the perfect fifth. The concept denotes the distance of seven semitones between two pitches and stacks prominently in scales, chords, and harmonic progressions. While modern English usage typically employs the word “fifth,” quinte remains encountered in older theoretical writings and in non-English musical vocabularies.

In betting and gaming, Quinté (often written with an accent) is a French horse racing wager offered by the PMU (Pari Mutuel Urbain). Bettors attempt to predict the five horses that will finish in the top five of a given race, with different variants providing order-dependent or order-independent formats and varying prize structures.

Overall, quinte functions as a cross-domain term whose meaning depends on context, spanning geography, music, and gambling.