Word.ws English Dictionary

query

/ˈkwɪə.ɹi/US/ˈkwɪɹ.i/

More pronunciations (1)Fewer pronunciations

query noun: a question, an inquiry (US), an enquiry (UK). Also the ellipsis of query letter.

Noun

query (plural queries)

  1. A question, an inquiry (US), an enquiry (UK).
    • The teacher answered the student’s query concerning biosynthesis.
    • Carried somehow, somewhither, for some reason, on these surging floods, were these travelers, of errand not wholly obvious to their fellows, yet of such sort as to call into query alike the nature of their errand and their own relations.1910, Emerson Hough, “The Gateway, and Some Who Passed”, in The Purchase Price: Or The Cause of Compromise, Indianapolis, Ind.: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, →OCLC, page 29
  2. A question mark.
    • His Glossary has ‘bouchen, to stop people's mouths,’; but this is followed by a query, to show that it was but a guess. I have shown, from the MSS. and other sources, that it should be bonched, i.e. bunched, bumped, knocked, smote.1886, Skeat, Address of the President to the Philological Society, Great Britain
    • She had written in her diary: "I don't think I am in a concentration-camp??????", the queries growing larger and more numerous till they covered the entire page […]1973, Oliver Sacks, Awakenings
  3. A set of instructions passed to a database.
    • The database admin switched on query logging for debugging purposes.

Verb

query (third-person singular simple present queries, present participle querying, simple past and past participle queried)

  1. (intransitive) To ask a question.
  2. (transitive) To ask, inquire.
    • It’s queried whether there be any Science in the ſenſe of the Dogmatiſts: […]1661, Joseph Glanvill, chapter XX, in The Vanity of Dogmatizing: Or Confidence in Opinions. […], London: […] E. C[otes] for Henry Eversden […], →OCLC, page 188
    • “You must have had an active life,” queried the shopkeeper, “before you retired?”1994, Dermot Healy, “As Gaelige”, in A Goat’s Song, 1st American edition, New York, N.Y.: Viking, published 1995, →ISBN, part II (The Salmon of Knowledge), page 160
  3. (transitive) To question or call into doubt.
    • The story struck the depressingly familiar note with which true stories ring in the tried ears of experienced policemen. No one queried it. It was in the classic pattern of human weakness, mean and embarrassing and sad.1963, Margery Allingham, “Eye Witness”, in The China Governess: A Mystery, London: Chatto & Windus, →OCLC, page 249
  4. To pass a set of instructions to a database to retrieve information from it.
    • Linked tables can be accessed, queried, combined and reorganised much more flexibly and in a number of ways that may not be immediately predictable when the database is under construction.1999, Luciano Floridi, Philosophy and computing: an introduction, page 104
  5. (Internet, transitive) To send a private message to (a user on IRC).
    • if you know someone who is in the channel, you can query them and ask for the key.2000, Robert Erdec, “Re: Help; mIRC32; unable to resolve server arnes.si”, in alt.irc.mirc (Usenet)
  6. (intransitive) To send out a query letter.

Proper noun capitalized: Query

Query (plural Querys)

  1. A surname.

Also used as

query is also the ellipsis of query letter.

query meaning in Urdu, Arabic, Indonesian and Thai

query in Urdu

استفسار

query in Arabic

computing: set of instructions passed to a database
اِسْتِعْلام istiʕlām

query in Indonesian

computing: set of instructions passed to a database
kueri, permintaan

query in Thai

computing: set of instructions passed to a database
สอบถาม sɔ̀ɔp-tǎam

Examples of query in a sentence

  • An expert, given a certain query, will often come up with a crisp answer: “yes” or “no”.
  • That metadata makes it much easier for the search engine to crunch the data for queries.
  • Remember to sanitize your query parameters to avoid SQL injection exploits.

All 40 example sentences with query

Forms of query

Noun
pluralqueries
alternative form (archaic)quæry
Verb
third-person singular presentqueries
present participlequerying
past participlequeried
pastqueried
Proper noun
pluralQuerys

Past tense of query: queried

Plural of query: queries

Origin of query

An anglicisation of quere, an obsolete variant form of Latin quaere, second-person singular present active imperative of quaerō (“seek, look for; ask”); perhaps suffixed with -y (“abstract noun”). Cognate with French quérir, Italian chiedere, Portuguese querer, Romanian cere, and Spanish querer. Compare question.

Words formed from query

Phrases with query

Words that rhyme with query

9 more rhymesFewer rhymes

Questions about query

What does query mean?
Query means a question, an inquiry (US), an enquiry (UK).
What is query in Urdu?
Query in Urdu is استفسار. See Query meaning in Urdu.
What part of speech is query?
Query can be a noun, a verb or a proper noun.
How do you pronounce query?
Query is pronounced /ˈkwɪə.ɹi/ (UK).
What is the plural of query?
The plural of query is queries.

Words near query in the dictionary

  1. querulosity
  2. querulous
  3. querulously
  4. querulousness
  5. querulousnesses
  6. query
  7. query language
  8. query languages
  9. query letter
  10. query letters
  11. query plan

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: query (page history and authors); Query (page history and authors); query (Urdu, IndicTrans2 machine translation) (model and license). 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: “query.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/query. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.