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Etymology edit

quarter +‎ staff, attested since about 1550. Probably originally referred to a staff cut from the heartwood of a certain size of tree which was cleft into four parts, per the OED.

Pronunciation edit

Noun edit

quarterstaff (plural quarterstaffs or quarterstaves)

  1. A wooden staff of an approximate length between 2 and 2.5 meters, sometimes tipped with iron, used as a weapon in rural England during the Early Modern period.
    • 1600, William Kempe, Kemps nine daies vvonder:
      Name my accuſer ſaith he, or I defye thee Kemp at the quart ſtaffe.
    • 1881, Walter Besant, James Rice, “How Kitty First Saw the Doctor”, in The Chaplain of the Fleet [], volume I, London: Chatto and Windus, [], →OCLC, part I (Within the Rules), page 82:
      [F]ew country people there are who do not love to see two sturdy fellows thwack and belabour each other with quarter-staff, single-stick, or fists.
  2. Fighting or exercise with the quarterstaff.
    He was very adept at quarterstaff.

Usage notes edit

An attestation from 1590 of a quarter Ashe staffe shows that the "quarter" was an apposition and could still be detached (Richard Harvey, Plaine Perceuall the peace-maker of England , cited after the OED). Joseph Swetnam (1615) uses "quarterstaff" in the same sense in which George Silver (1599) had used "short staff", viz. for the staff between about 2 and 2.5 meters in length, as opposed to the "long staff" of a length exceeding 3 meters.

Contemporary use of the word disappears during the 18th century, and beginning with 19th-century Romanticism the word is mostly limited to antiquarian or historical usage.

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