What is "quad"

Quad \Quad\, n. (Arch.) A quadrangle; hence, a prison. [Cant or Slang]

Quad \Quad\, n. (Print.) A quadrat.

Quad \Quad\, Quade \Quade\, a. [Akin to AS. cw[=ae]d, cwead, dung, evil, G. kot, dung, OHG. qu[=a]t.] Evil; bad; baffling; as, a quade wind. [Obs.]

Sooth play, quad play, as the Fleming saith.
--Chaucer.

1820 as a shortening of quadrangle (n.) in the building sense (in this case "quadrangle of a college," Oxford student slang); 1880 as short for quadrat (n.); 1896 as quadruplet (n.), originally "bicycle for four riders;" later "one of four young at a single birth" (1951, of armadillos); 1970 as quadraphonic (adj.). Related: Quads.

Etymology 1

1. 1 Having four shots of espresso. 2 (context poker slang English) Of or relating to quads#Noun. n. 1 (context informal English) A quadrangle (gloss: courtyard). 2 (context informal English) A quadruplet (gloss: infant). 3 (cx computer graphics English) A quadrilateral. 4 (context informal English) A quadriceps muscle. 5 Four shots of espresso. 6 A quad bike. 7 (context chess English) A kind of round robin tournament between four players, where each participant plays every other participant once. 8 (context Mormonism English) The Bible, Book of Mormon, Doctrine and Covenants, and Pearl of Great Price bound in a single volume. Etymology 2

   alt. 1 (context metal type English) A blank metal block used to fill short lines of type. 2 (context printing slang English) A joke used to fill long days of setting type. 3 (context typography phototypesetting and digital typesetting English) A keyboard command which aligns text with the left or right margin, or centred between them. In combination, as ''quad left, quad right(,)'' or ''quad centre''. n. 1 (context metal type English) A blank metal block used to fill short lines of type. 2 (context printing slang English) A joke used to fill long days of setting type. 3 (context typography phototypesetting and digital typesetting English) A keyboard command which aligns text with the left or right margin, or centred between them. In combination, as ''quad left, quad right(,)'' or ''quad centre''. v

2. 1 (context metal type transitive intransitive English) To fill spaces in a line of type with quads. Also ''quad out''. 2 (context typography phototypesetting and digital typesetting transitive intransitive English) To align text with the left or right margin, or centre it.

1. n. one of four children born at the same time from the same pregnancy [syn: quadruplet]

2. a muscle of the thigh that extends the leg [syn: quadriceps, quadriceps femoris, musculus quadriceps femoris]

3. (printing) a block of type without a raised letter; used for spacing between words [syn: space]

4. a rectangular area surrounded on all sides by buildings [syn: quadrangle]

QUaD, an acronym for QUEST at DASI, is a ground based cosmic microwave backrground (CMB) polarization experiment located at the South Pole. QUEST (Q and U Extragalactic Sub-mm Telescope) was the original name attributed to the bolometer detector instrument, while DASI is a famous CMB interferometry experiment credited with the first detection of CMB polarization. QUaD uses the existing DASI mechanical infrastructure but replaces the DASI interferometric array with a bolometer detector at the end of a cassegrain optical system.

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In rocketry, the Armadillo Aerospace Quad vehicle called Pixel is a computer-controlled VTVL rocket that was used in 2006 to compete in the Lunar Lander Challenge.

QUAD is a high-performance data compressor based on the LZ algorithms ( LZ77, LZ78, LZW). It's designed to produce small files but still decompress fast and with little memory. QUAD is licensed under the LGPL.

In cryptography, the QUAD, cipher is a relatively new stream cipher, which was designed with provable security arguments in mind.

Quad (also known as Cripple) is a 2013 drama film starring Aaron Paul, Jeff Daniels and Tom Berenger. Filming took place in Michigan.

Quad or QUAD was the name of a solo music project by Gary Ramon.

During his six-year hiatus from Sun Dial, Ramon embarked on an ambitious solo project, Quad, which combined ambient electronica with kraut rock. The result was a pair of self-titled albums. The first of these was released on Ramon's own Acme Records in 1997 as a 1000-copy limited edition on 12" clear vinyl with a transparent sleeve. The second Quad album was released in 1998 on the Prescription label as a 99-copy limited edition LP.

A 1999 American re-release of the first album on CD and 10" LP on the Man's Ruin label was scheduled, but eventually cancelled.

Both albums are now highly sought-after collectors' items.

Quad is a television play by Samuel Beckett, written and first produced and broadcast in 1981. It first appeared in print in 1984 ( Faber and Faber) where the work is described as "[a] piece for four players, light and percussion" and has also been called a " ballet for four people."

It consists of four actors dressed in robes, hunched and silently walking around and diagonally across a square stage in fixed patterns, alternately entering and exiting. Each actor wears a distinct colored robe (white, red, blue, yellow), and is accompanied by a distinct percussion instrument ( leitmotif). The actors walk in sync (except when entering or exiting), always on one of four rotationally symmetric paths (e.g., when one actor is at a corner, so are all others; when one actor crosses the stage, all do so together, etc.), and never touch – when walking around the stage, they move in the same direction, while when crossing the stage diagonally, where they would touch in the middle, they avoid the center area (walking around it, always clockwise or always anti-clockwise, depending on the production). In the original production, the play was first performed once, and then, after a pause, an abbreviated version is performed a second time, this time in black and white and without musical accompaniment. These are distinguished as Quad I and Quad II, though Quad II does not appear in print.

A quad is a unit of energy equal to 10 (a short-scale quadrillion) BTU, or 1.055 × 10 joules (1.055 exajoules or EJ) in SI units.

The unit is used by the U.S. Department of Energy in discussing world and national energy budgets. The global primary energy production in 2004 was 446 quad, equivalent to 471 EJ.

Some common types of an energy carrier approximately equal to 1 quad are:

• 8,007,000,000 gallons (US) of gasoline
• 293,071,000,000 kilowatt-hours (kWh)
• 293.07 terawatt-hours (TWh)
• 33.434 gigawatt-years (GWy)
• 36,000,000 tonnes of coal
• 970,434,000,000 cubic feet of natural gas
• 5,996,000,000 UK gallons of diesel oil
• 25,200,000 tonnes of oil
• 252,000,000 tonnes of TNT or five times the energy of the Tsar Bomba nuclear test
• 13.3 tonnes of uranium-235

A quad, or quadruple, is a figure skating jump with four or more, but fewer than five, revolutions. Most quadruple jumps have exactly four revolutions; the quadruple Axel has 4½ revolutions, although no figure skater to date has completed this jump in competition.

In the singles competition for men, the first person to land a ratified quadruple jump in competition was Kurt Browning in 1988. The quadruple toe loop and quadruple Salchow are the two most commonly skated in the discipline. The first quad Lutz was ratified in 2011. Then the first quad Flip jump was ratified in 2016. Quadruple jumps have become increasingly common among World and Olympic level men's single skaters, to the point that not having one in a program may be considered a handicap.

In the singles competition for ladies, only Miki Ando has landed a ratified quadruple jump.

In the pair skating competition, top skaters are executing either quad throw jumps or quad twist lifts.

In typography, a quad (originally quadrat) was a metal spacer used in letterpress typesetting. The term was later adopted as the generic name for two common sizes of spaces in typography, regardless of the form of typesetting used. An em quad is a space that is one em wide; as wide as the height of the font. An en quad is a space that is one en wide: half the width of an em quad.

Both are encoded as characters in the General Punctuation code block of the Unicode character set as U+2000 EN QUAD and U+2001 EM QUAD, which are also defined to be canonically equivalent to U+2002 EN SPACE and U+2003 EM SPACE respectively.