What is "quadrille"

Quadrille \Qua*drille"\, n. [F. quadrille, n. masc., cf. It. quadriglio; or perhaps from the Spanish. See Quadrille a dance.] A game played by four persons with forty cards, being the remainder of an ordinary pack after the tens, nines, and eights are discarded.
--Hoyle.

Quadrille \Qua*drille"\, n. [F. quadrille, n. fem., fr. Sp. cuadrilla meeting of four or more persons or It. quadriglia a band of soldiers, a sort of dance; dim. fr. L. quadra a square, fr. quattuor four. See Quadrate.]

1. A dance having five figures, in common time, four couples of dancers being in each set.

2. The appropriate music for a quadrille.

1773, "lively square dance for four couples," from French quadrille (17c.), originally one of four groups of horsemen in a tournament (a sense attested in English from 1738), from Spanish cuadrilla, diminutive of cuadro "four-sided battle square," from Latin quadrum "a square," related to quattuor "four" (see four). The craze for the dance hit England in 1816, and it underwent a vigorous revival late 19c. among the middle classes.\n

\nEarlier the name of a popular card game for four hands, and in this sense from French quadrille (1725), from Spanish cuartillo, from cuarto "fourth," from Latin quartus. OED notes it as fashionable from 1726 ("and was in turn superseded by whist"), the year of Swift's (or Congreve's) satirical ballad on the craze:\n\nThe commoner, and knight, the peer,\n
Men of all ranks and fame,\n
Leave to their wives the only care,\n
To propagate their name;\n
And well that duty they fulfil\n
When the good husband's at Quadrille &c.\n

Etymology 1 n. 1 A dance originating in the mid-1700s with four dancers forming a square, rather much like the modern square dance. 2 The music for this dance. 3 (context card games English) A Spanish trick-taking card game from the 1700s. 4 A choreographed dressage ride, commonly performed to music, with a minimum of four horses. vb. (context intransitive English) To dance the quadrille. Etymology 2

n. Quadrille ruled graph paper, quad paper.

1. n. music for dancing the quadrille

2. a square dance of 5 or more figures for 4 or more couples

The Quadrille is a dance that was fashionable in late 18th- and 19th-century Europe and its colonies. Performed by four couples in a rectangular formation, it is related to American square dancing. The Lancers, a variant of the quadrille, became popular in the late 19th century and was still danced in the 20th century in folk-dance clubs. A derivative found in the Francophone Lesser Antilles is known as kwadril, and the dance is also still found in Madagascar and is within old Jamaican / Caribbean culture.

The quadrille consists of a chain of four to six contredanses, courtly versions of English country dances that had been taken up at the court of Louis XIV and spread across Europe. Latterly the quadrille was frequently danced to a medley of opera melodies.

Quadrille is a play by Noël Coward. The romantic comedy premiered in 1952 and starred Lynn Fontanne and Alfred Lunt. It played on Broadway in 1955, where Lunt won a Tony Award for his performance.

Quadrille is a choreographed dressage ride, commonly performed to music, which is often compared to an equestrian ballet or to a drill team. A minimum of four horses are used, although many times more (always in pairs), which perform movements together. Quadrille may be ridden as a performance, such as those given by the Spanish Riding School, or as a competitive test with judging. At the highest level, quadrille includes movements such as shoulder-in, travers, half-pass, passage, flying changes, and canter pirouettes.

Quadrille is a dance.

Quadrille may also refer to:

• Quadrille (card game), a trick-taking card game
• Quadrille (dressage), a choreographed dressage ride
• Quadrille (play), a 1952 play by Noël Coward
• Square tiling in geometry
• Quadrille (film), a film by Valérie Lemercier
• Quadrille, a type of graph paper

Quadrille is a card game that was popular in the 18th century. A variant of the Spanish card game Ombre, it is played by four players in pairs, with a deck of 40 cards (the 8's, 9's and 10's being removed). By the end of the 19th century, the card game had fallen out of fashion.

The novel Pride and Prejudice includes four references to the quadrille card game being played by an upper class character, Lady Catherine de Bourgh, and her guests. In the Diary of Thomas Vernon, which was written by a loyalist from Newport, Rhode Island, during the American Revolution in 1776, the author mentions playing quadrille frequently while exiled in Glocester, Rhode Island, during the war. It is also frequently mentioned in The Diary of a Country Parson 1758-1802 kept by James Woodforde, edited by John Beresford.