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ENGLISH · A WORD WITH POSSIBILITIES

esquire.

A lawyer.

7 characters2 syllables approx.English language

Meaning & usage

noun/ɪˈskwaɪə/UK/ˈɛskwaɪɚ/General-American
  1. A lawyer.

    US · usually
  2. A male member of the gentry ranking below a knight.

  3. An honorific sometimes placed after a man's name.

  4. A gentleman who attends or escorts a lady in public.

  5. A squire; a youth who in the hopes of becoming a knight attended upon a knight

    archaic
  6. A shield-bearer, but also applied to other attendants.

    obsolete
Where this word comes from

From Middle English esquier, from Old French escuyer, escuier, properly, a shield-bearer (compare modern French écuyer (“shield-bearer, armor-bearer, squire of a knight, esquire, equerry, rider, horseman”)), from Late Latin scūtārius (“shieldmaker, shield-bearer”), from Latin scūtum (“shield”); probably akin to English hide (“to cover”). The term squire is the result of apheresis. Compare equerry, escutcheon.

verb/ɪˈskwaɪə/UK/ˈɛskwaɪɚ/General-American
  1. To attend, wait on, escort.

    obsolete · transitive
Where this word comes from

From Middle English esquier, from Old French escuyer, escuier, properly, a shield-bearer (compare modern French écuyer (“shield-bearer, armor-bearer, squire of a knight, esquire, equerry, rider, horseman”)), from Late Latin scūtārius (“shieldmaker, shield-bearer”), from Latin scūtum (“shield”); probably akin to English hide (“to cover”). The term squire is the result of apheresis. Compare equerry, escutcheon.

noun/ɪˈskwaɪə/UK/ˈɛskwaɪɚ/General-American
  1. The lower of the halves into which a square is divided diagonally, a single gyron, but potentially larger (extending across the shield) or smaller (for example, on Mortimer's arms).

    rare
Where this word comes from

Old French esquiere, esquierre, esquarre (“a square”) (whence modern French équerre), perhaps via a form like based esquire from bas d'esquire ("bottom of a square"), whence attested forms base (e)squire, e(s)quire bast.

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Definitions, grammatical labels, IPA, etymology and examples: Wiktionary contributors, extracted by Kaikki / Wiktextract. Adapted under CC BY-SA 4.0. Selected fields and authored examples are shown; third-party quotations and audio are omitted. See contributor history.

Last enriched 2026-09-10. Definitions are in English. Romanizations are shown when supplied by the source; syllable estimates are omitted for unsupported scripts.