Gender: Masculine
Usage: Literature
Meaning
From the name of the Sunday that follows Easter, called Quasimodo Sunday, which gets its name from the opening words of the Latin chant quasi modo (geniti infantes…) meaning “like the way (that newborn infants do…)”. It was used by Victor Hugo for his novel The Hunchback of Notre-Dame (1831), in which Quasimodo is a hunchbacked bellringer at Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. He was named thus by Archdeacon Frollo because he was abandoned as a baby at the cathedral on Quasimodo Sunday, though Hugo states that Frollo may have been inspired by the alternate meaning for quasi “almost”, referring to the almost-complete appearance of the foundling [1].