Meaning

One-twentieth of a ream of paper; a collection of twenty-four or twenty-five sheets of paper of the same size and quality, unfolded or having a single fold..

Definitions by Sense

1. One-twentieth of a ream of paper; a collection of twenty-four or twenty-five sheets of paper of the same size and quality, unfolded or having a single fold.
2. (bookbinding) A set of leaves which are stitched together, originally a set of four pieces of paper (eight leaves, sixteen pages). This is most often a single signature (i.e. group of four), but may be several nested signatures.
3. A book, poem, or pamphlet.
4. (bookbinding) To prepare quires by stitching together leaves of paper.
5. (architecture) Uncommon form of choir (“one quarter of a cruciform church, or the architectural area of a church used by the choir, often near the apse”).
6. Archaic spelling of choir (“group of people who sing together”).
7. Poetic spelling of choir (“to sing in concert”).

Example Sentences

Under the year 1533 we are told that the ream contained twenty quires.

[…] and we must accept the fact that all those good novels, Villette, Emma, Wuthering Heights, Middlemarch, were written by women without more experience of life than could enter the house of a clergyman; written too in the common sitting-room of that respectable house and by women so poor that they could not afford to buy more than a few quires of paper at a time upon which to write Wuthering Heights or Jane Eyre.

We saw above that the fourth quire consists of ten folios, two of which (folios 29 and 31) Richer added to a quaternion (folios 23 to 28, 30, 32). Most of the folios Richer added to his manuscript supplement, elaborate, or amend text that he had already composed in the codex. In this quire, however, Richer wrote around the added folios as if it was the quire he added to them, not the converse. Indeed, if we were to remove folios 29 and 31, there would be neither grammatical nor narrative continuity between the original folios of the quire which would face each other, that is, between folios 28^(v[erso]) and 30^(r[ecto]) on the one hand, or folios 30ᵛ and 32ʳ on the other.

Now, in the first folio volume of 1616, the paging, signatures, and quiring are continuous and regular throughout.

This is a natural point at which to ask why quiring went out of fashion.

By means of these smooth pages we can mostly see how the modern binder made up the book, but whether in doing this he followed the original quiring is quite another matter.

Word Forms

• quires
• quiring
• quired

Related Words

When Should You Use Quire?

Use quire when its meaning, tone and grammar fit the full sentence. A synonym is not always a direct replacement.

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