What does the phrase 'Quote-O-Matic' mean?

A sample application in the book 'Test Drive ASP.NET MVC' used this as its title.


Without seeing any context it's difficult to say, but it probably means some kind of program that automatically spews out quotes.

Copywriters often coin new words by taking the last part of "automatic" (the "-omatic" part) and putting some other noun or start of a noun to make a word that means an automatic something-or-other.

This is usually advertising speak. The book's author is just trying to be funny by calling the app Quote-o-Matic. It's not uncommon for authors of tech books to indulge in a bit of silliness now and then.


"O-matic" is a fairly common suffix used by marketing weasels to imply that the device in question has made a particular task easy to accomplish. So using the suffix "O-Matic" is a sort of tongue-in-cheek way of saying that you have something that makes the affixed task or item easy to accomplish (and does pretty much nothing else useful).

If I saw it on an application named "Quote-O-matic", I would assume that I am dealing with a small, cheap application that does nothing but generate quotes.

So where did this come from? Well, the suffix "O-matic" was a special favorite of companies that hawked cheap single-use kitchen devices in late-night TV commercials back in the 60's and 70's (in the USA at least). Particularly one company named Ronco, whose Wikipedia entry starts thusly:

Ronco is an American company that manufactures and sells a variety of items and devices, most commonly those used in the kitchen. Ron Popeil founded the company in 1964, and commercials for the company's products soon became pervasive and memorable, in part thanks to Popeil's personal sales pitches. The names "Ronco" and "Popeil" and the suffix "-O-Matic" (used in many early product names) became icons of American popular culture and were often referred to by comedians introducing fictional gadgets.

As an interesting aside, these same Ronco commercials also are the source of the phrases (often today used either together or separately):

Now how much would you pay? ...but wait! There's more!