/skwɒt/
[verb] To bend your knees and lower your body close to the ground, keeping your back straight. It can also mean to live in an empty building without permission.
The word 'squat' originally meant to be crushed flat — like a bug under a boot — before it ever described a person crouching.
The word 'squat' arrives in English in the 14th century from Old French 'esquatir', meaning to crush or press flat. This Old French verb was itself built from two parts: the prefix 'es-' (from Latin 'ex-', meaning out or thoroughly) combined with 'quatir', meaning to press down or hide by crouching. That root 'quatir' traces back further to Latin 'coactus', the past participle of 'cogere', meaning to force or compress together — from 'co-' (together) and 'agere' (to drive or push). So at its deepest root, 'squat' is about things being driven forcefully together until they are flattened.
When the word first appeared in Middle English, it carried this sense of being crushed or pressed flat — imagine something squashed down by a great weight. It described a state of being flattened rather than a deliberate physical action. A fish pressed flat, a body hurled to the ground — these were the images the word first conjured. It was less about the graceful lowering of oneself and more about the result of violent compression.
Over the 15th and 16th centuries, the meaning began to soften and shift. Instead of describing the result of being crushed, 'squat' started to describe the act of crouching low deliberately — bending the knees, sitting on one's heels, pressing oneself down close to the earth. Animals hiding in undergrowth, hunters waiting in the bushes, children playing in the dirt — all could now be described as squatting. The sense of compression remained, but the violence drained away. What was left was the shape: low, compact, close to the ground.
This shift in physical meaning also gave birth to the adjective 'squat', used to describe people or things that are short and broad — thick-set, wide, and low. A squat little building, a squat fireplug, a squat wrestler — all carry that same ancient idea of something pressed down and compacted. The shape implied by the crushed original meaning never truly disappeared; it just migrated from an action to a description of physical form.
The sense of occupying a space without permission — 'squatting' in an empty house or on unused land — developed later, appearing more prominently in the 18th and 19th centuries. The connection is logical: a squatter presses themselves into a space uninvited, settling low and close, making themselves hard to remove, much like something flattened into a surface. In many parts of the world, squatting became a serious social and political issue as urbanisation pushed poor populations to occupy vacant land or abandoned buildings, and the word took on a whole new layer of meaning tied to poverty, protest, and property rights.
Finally, in the world of fitness and exercise, 'the squat' has become one of the most celebrated and debated movements in all of sport and physical training. The deliberate lowering of the body — thighs parallel to the floor, spine upright, weight balanced — is now performed in gyms across the globe. Few people doing a barbell back squat would ever guess that the word they use for this prized athletic movement began its life describing something being utterly crushed flat.