the.com/squat

means To lower your body by bending your knees and hips, as if sitting into an invisible chair — or, as a noun, that very exercise, or a place occupied without permission or ownership.

from Squat traces to Old French esquatir, meaning 'to flatten or crush down,' built from the prefix es- ('out') plus quatir ('to press down'), which goes back to Latin coactus, the past participle of cogere, 'to force together, compel' — the same root that gives us 'cogent.' The body-dropping sense came first, picturing something squashed low to the ground; the housing sense ('to occupy land or a building without title') emerged much later, in the 1700s, from the image of simply hunkering down on ground that isn't yours.