Definitions

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun Same as query.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • Inquire; question; see; -- used to signify doubt or to suggest investigation.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • verb archaic To ask or query; used imperatively to introduce a question or signify doubt.
  • noun archaic A question or query.

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From Latin quaere, second-person singular present active imperative of quaerō ("seek, look for; ask").

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Examples

  • Aristotle, who will still have a hand in everything, makes a 'quaere' upon the saying of Solon, that none can be said to be happy until he is dead: "whether, then, he who has lived and died according to his heart's desire, if he have left an ill repute behind him, and that his posterity be miserable, can be said to be happy?"

    The Essays of Montaigne — Complete Michel de Montaigne 1562

  • Aristotle, who will still have a hand in everything, makes a 'quaere' upon the saying of Solon, that none can be said to be happy until he is dead: "whether, then, he who has lived and died according to his heart's desire, if he have left an ill repute behind him, and that his posterity be miserable, can be said to be happy?"

    The Essays of Montaigne — Volume 02 Michel de Montaigne 1562

  • Highlanders; (quaere, Alan, dost thou derive the courage thou makest such boast of from an hereditary source?) and stories of Rob Roy Macgregor, and

    Redgauntlet 2008

  • Swear, protest, take God and all his angels to witness, quaere peregrinum, thou art a counterfeit crank, a cheater, he is not touched with it, pauper ubique jacet, ride on, he takes no notice of it.

    Anatomy of Melancholy 2007

  • It had been an excellent quaere to have posed the devil of Delphos, and must needs have forced him to some strange amphibology.

    Religio Medici 2007

  • Had ten dozen of hornets stung him behind in so many different places all at one time — he could not have exerted more mechanical functions in fewer seconds — or started half so much, as with one single quaere of three words unseasonably popping in full upon him in his hobby-horsical career.

    The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman 2003

  • Had ten dozen of hornets stung him behind in so many different places all at one time — he could not have exerted more mechanical functions in fewer seconds -- or started half so much, as with one single quaere of three words unseasonably popping in full upon him in his hobby-horsical career.

    The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman 2003

  • Grant points out to me the asyndeton following _quaere ... sintne_.

    The Last Poems of Ovid 43 BC-18? Ovid

  • If the college is under good regulations, and they have proper tutors to prepare boys of his standing for the higher branches of education, he makes a quaere if it would not be better to put him there at once, the presumption being that a system may prevail there by which the gradations are better connected than in schools which have no correspondence with each other.

    Washington in Domestic Life Rush, Richard, 1780-1859 1857

  • But quaere, if they should be imitated more than as to other breaches of trust in general.

    Memoir Correspondence And Miscellanies Jefferson, Thomas 1829

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