Word.ws English Dictionary

quadrille

/kwɒdˈɹɪl/

quadrille noun: a dance originating in the mid-1700s with four couples forming a square, rather much like the modern square dance.

quadrille: a dance originating in the mid-1700s with four couples forming a square, rather much like the...
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Noun (1)

quadrille (plural quadrilles)

  1. A dance originating in the mid-1700s with four couples forming a square, rather much like the modern square dance.
    • There is plenty of company, consisting of young men and women, all very neatly dressed in white and black - a true Portuguese habit. Quadrilles, waltzes, polkas, and mazurkas are danced with great vigour and much skill.1869, Alfred Russel Wallace, The Malay Archipelago, volume II, London: Macmillan and Co., page 48
    • The movements of the other women were more or less similar to Tess's, the whole bevy of them drawing together like dancers in a quadrille at the completion of a sheaf by each, every one placing her sheaf on end against those of the rest, till a shock, or 'stitch' as it was here called, of ten or a...1891, Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d’Urbervilles: A Pure Woman Faithfully Presented […], volume II, London: James R[ipley] Osgood, McIlvaine and Co., […], →OCLC
  2. The music for this dance.
    • There was ol' Mickey Coote
      Who played hard on his flute
      When the ladies lined up for a set
      He was tootin' with skill
      For each sparkling quadrille
      Though the dancers were fluther'd and betc. 19th century, J. M. Crofts, “The Irish Rover”
  3. A Spanish trick-taking card game from the 1700s played with a 40-card deck.
    • It now first struck her that she was selected from among her sisters as worthy of being the mistress of Hunsford Parsonage, and of assisting to form a quadrille table at Rosings, in the absence of more eligible visitors.1813 January 27, [Jane Austen], chapter 17, in Pride and Prejudice: […], volume (please specify |volume=I to III), London: […] [George Sidney] for T[homas] Egerton, […], →OCLC
  4. A choreographed dressage ride, commonly performed to music, with a minimum of four horses.

Verb

quadrille (third-person singular simple present quadrilles, present participle quadrilling, simple past and past participle quadrilled)

  1. (intransitive) To dance the quadrille.
    • We quadrilled, waltzed, and conversed, in all of which my clever partner excelled; and her charms, combined with the excellent champagne I imbibed, fairly dazzled my imagination.1834, Arthur Courtenay, Autobiography and Letters of Arthur Courtenay, page 36

Adjective

quadrille (not comparable)

  1. Marked with squares.
    • Penknife, hand-lens, padlock key, marching compass and small cash went in his trouser pockets, leaving the tunic pockets for the little black quadrille notebook, pencil and pen, and the breast pockets for his breviary on one side and cigarettes and matches on the other.1961, Robert Francouer, The World of Teilhard, pages 28-29
    • He would write “one paragraph at time”, always beginning each novel in longhand – he favoured notebooks with quadrille lines (those little squares).2024 May 1, Lisa Allardice, “Brooklyn’s bard: Paul Auster’s tricksy fiction captivated a generation”, in The Guardian, →ISSN

Noun (2)

quadrille (plural quadrilles)

  1. Quadrille ruled graph paper, quad paper.

Noun (3)

quadrille (plural quadrilles)

  1. A square tiling of the plane.

quadrille meaning in Urdu

quadrille in Urdu

چوپتیا, چوکڑی ناچ

Forms of quadrille

Noun
pluralquadrilles
Verb
third-person singular presentquadrilles
present participlequadrilling
past participlequadrilled
pastquadrilled

Origin of quadrille

French, in sense of “group of knights”, from Spanish cuadrilla, diminutive of cuadra (“square”) (compare also cuadra (“four”)), from Latin quadra.

From French quadrillé (“crosshatched”, adjective).

Term used by John Horton Conway.

Words formed from quadrille

Phrases with quadrille

Words that rhyme with quadrille

48 more rhymesFewer rhymes

Questions about quadrille

What does quadrille mean?
Quadrille means a dance originating in the mid-1700s with four couples forming a square, rather much like the modern square dance.
What is quadrille in Urdu?
Quadrille in Urdu is چوپتیا, چوکڑی ناچ. See Quadrille meaning in Urdu.
What part of speech is quadrille?
Quadrille can be a noun, a verb or an adjective.
How do you pronounce quadrille?
Quadrille is pronounced /kwɒdˈɹɪl/.
What is the plural of quadrille?
The plural of quadrille is quadrilles.

Words near quadrille in the dictionary

  1. quadrilinguals
  2. quadriliteral
  3. quadriliteralism
  4. quadriliterals
  5. quadrillage
  6. quadrille
  7. quadrille paper
  8. quadrille papers
  9. quadrilled
  10. quadriller
  11. quadrillers

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: quadrille (page history and authors); quadrille (Urdu Wiktionary) (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “quadrille.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/quadrille. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.