- 1
A quire is a bundle of paper counted as 24 sheets (some shops count 25). Twenty such bundles make a ream of 480 or 500 sheets, depending on which count you use. Printers, , and paper sellers still know the word; ordinary students may never need it. In older bookmaking, a quire was also a gathering: sheets folded together to make a section of a book (the Latin idea is ‘’, from folding). There is a rare verb, to quire, meaning to gather sheets into those bundles. The tidy dictionary number is 24; real paper trade has long wobbled between 24 and 25. It is not choir, the singers — though in many accents the two sound the same.
紙的舊計量單位，24張（有時算25張）。台灣印刷行多半用「令」（約500張），較少說這個字。
組成From Middle English quayer, from Anglo-Norman quaier and Old French quaer, from Latin quaternus, ‘fourfold’, from quater, ‘four times’. Doublet of cahier.
同家族的字
- cahierdoublet: same Latin source, a different path into English (a notebook or exercise book)
原始詞典資料7 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法，原文照列，我們還沒有寫成教學內容。上面的說明才是我們自己寫的；有些用法可能上面已經講過了。
quirenoun詞源 1/ˈkwaɪ.ə(ɹ)/
- 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.
- 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.
- 2
artsbookbindingcraftsA 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.
quireverb詞源 1/ˈkwaɪ.ə(ɹ)/
- 1
artsbookbindingcraftsTo prepare quires by stitching together leaves of paper.
- 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.
quireverb詞源 2/ˈkwaɪ.ə(ɹ)/
- 1
Poetic spelling of choir (“to sing in concert”).
- Sit, Jessica. Look how the floor of heaven / Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold: / There's not the smallest orb which thou behold'st / But in his motion like an angel sings, / Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubins; / Such harmony is in immortal souls; / But whilst this muddy vesture of decay / Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it.
- I saw the 'potamus take wing / Ascending from the damp savannas, / And quiring angels round him sing / The praise of God, in loud hosannas.
這個拼法也被記錄為下列字的變化形：
資料來源：英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary（CC BY-SA 4.0）。 原文照列，未經改寫。