Comments are OPEN. Please note that comments are moderated, and will sometimes take a few days to appear. About subscriber content ». They rhyme for a reason. Pin It. November 19th, Category: columns , November Tim B. Brian R. Leonard White. Andy Z. Rosemary Holloway. Please support The Word Detective. Meaning "band of singers" in English is from c. Re-spelled midc.
The Greek word is of uncertain origin, because the original sense is unknown. Extension from dance to voice is because Attic drama arose from tales inserted in the intervals of the dance. In Attic tragedy, the khoros of 12 or 15 tragic or 24 comedic persons gave expression, between the acts, to the moral and religious sentiments evoked by the actions of the play.
English 16c. The meaning "an organized company of singers" is from s. This was also the motivation for the change in the French spelling. We have had other spelling alterations for etymological reasons. Thanks to all of you. Hi friends, The book that I'm reading The Temporal Void by Peter Hamilton continues to amaze me with its extravagant spellings of certain words. This time I came across this sentence: A quire began to sing softly. I mean, I did check a few dictionaries and did not find anywhere quire meaning a group of singers.
Has anyone seen quire used instead of choir? Or is this a mistake similar to " their is a dog To my surprise, 'quire' is given equal billing with 'choir' in the OED online. It states "The spelling quire has never been altered in the English Prayer-book", so it may be particularly familiar to Anglicans. It also makes it clear that 'quire' or rather variants thereof is the original English spelling, stating "since the close of the 17th cent.
English - South-East England. It is legitimate but highly archaic. I've never seen it in modern prose. Checking the OED , I find that choir displaced earlier quire in the late s, but the English prayer-book pre-dates this, and its spelling has never been updated. So the older quire was still used as a poetic alternative in Byron, for example. Ha, and there was a previous similar thread that I did not find after entering the word "quire". So, it appears, the book's editor is again getting away with it I really had no idea this was the old [nay, ancient] spelling.
Yes, I was familiar with the modern meaning of quire , although that, too, will become extinct one day when most of us are gone together with the book as such Thank you all for your replies. It's pretty typical in science fiction to draw upon archaic or alternative spellings of words to produce different ways of writing familiar words.
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