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esquire

Pronunciation: /ɪˈskwaɪə/

The English word “esquire” has 8 meanings listed here.

noun

  1. A lawyer.
  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
  6. A shield-bearer, but also applied to other attendants.
  7. 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).

verb

  1. To attend, wait on, escort.

Etymology

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…

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Definitions are from Wiktionary, extracted by Kaikki.org, and are available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.