Word.ws English Dictionary

quire ken

quire ken is the alternative spelling of queer ken.

Meaning of queer ken

Noun

queer ken (plural queer kens)

  1. (UK, dated, thieves' cant and Polari) A prison.
    • Fact is, / she’ll end up in the charpering carsey / of Jennifer Justice. What is this / queer ken she’s in?2015 October 12, Adam Lowe, “Poem of the week: Vada That”, in The Guardian
    Synonyms:
    prison

Forms of quire ken

pluralquire kens

Questions about quire ken

What is quire ken the alternative spelling of?
Quire ken is the alternative spelling of queer ken.

Words near quire ken in the dictionary

  1. quira
  2. Quiraing
  3. Quirarte
  4. Quirartes
  5. quire
  6. quire ken
  7. quire kens
  8. quired
  9. quires
  10. quirewise
  11. Quirin

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: quire ken (page history and authors); queer ken (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: “quire ken.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/quire_ken. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.