quire

1 9.9

A group of usually twenty-four sheets of paper sold or used together

noun
/kwaɪər/

Archaic

: resma

In the foreground, to the right of the worker standing at the window, a pile of already-moistened quires is shown set between two wooden forms with a heavy weight on top.
quire of paper

Examples

He bought a quire of paper for his art project.
This time, four reams were disbursed: forty quires, each with twelve sheets; another quire with sixteen, for a total of 496 sheets per ream.

Academic text (1995)
On the right, moistened quires have been laid to dry on top of waste sheets.

Academic text (1995)
The illustration shows a vat man about to dip a quire into a large copper kettle filled with clear water.

Academic text (1995)
The manuscript is markedly luxurious; an elegant, humanist script graces its five gold-edged parchment quires.

Academic text (2008)
According to the text entry in the Encyclopédie under "printing," individual quires were moistened in fresh water, laid between two blankets, and covered with a weight.

Academic text (1995)
Each teacher was provided with a quire of stationery for the school year.
The recipe called for a quire of parchment to write the instructions.

Surface Forms

quire singular

quires plural

Etymology

Quire comes from the Latin quaternus meaning 'four each', the same root you see in quarter and quartet. Early printers made a quire by folding sets of four sheets into a small bundle, so a quire became the traditional group or measure of paper.