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A wise man named Huey Lewis once sang that “it’s hip to be square.” As lexicographers—a hip cadre if ever there was one—we heartily agree with this sentiment, not least because the song (as performed by Lewis and his trusted cadre of bandmates dubbed “the News”) prompts us to ponder an etymological descendent (via French and Italian) of the Latin word for square, quadrum: cadre. Squares being a logical and standard shape for frames (as of window and picture varieties), it’s easy to understand why French speakers and later English speakers adopted cadre as a word meaning “frame.” A sense of cadre referring to a metaphorical framework for something (such as a novel or curriculum) soon developed. And if you consider a group of officers in a military regiment as the framework that holds things together for the unit, you’ll understand how yet another sense of cadre, referring to a nucleus of trained personnel, arose. Military leaders and their troops are well-trained and work together as a unified team, which may explain why cadre is now sometimes used more generally to refer to any group of people who have some kind of unifying characteristic—such as a belief in the heart of rock and roll, or perhaps the power of love.
Examples of cadre in a Sentence
Jeremy Kahn, Fortune, 15 Jan. 2026
Calmer heads Instead, Perez and Albritton talked about setting a deliberate approach that measured ideas on their own merit instead of ranking them by the amount of pressure coming from DeSantis and his small cadre of loyalists.
—Orlando Sentinel Editorial Board, The Orlando Sentinel, 14 Jan. 2026
Johann Grunloh and Ugonna Onyenso form an incredibly imposing center tandem that gives UVA a sturdy interior foundation to go with a cadre of perimeter scorers.
—Jim Root, New York Times, 14 Jan. 2026
History suggests that the proficient cruelty of such regimes is unable to compensate for the stupidity and incompetence of their cadres.
—Elizabeth Tsurkov, The Atlantic, 11 Jan. 2026
See All Example Sentences for cadre
Cite this Entry
“Cadre.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/cadre. Accessed 18 Jan. 2026.
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