''cadre'' ▫ᴱᴺ｜Definition｜1st｜20260708144405-00-⌔

cadre - Wiktionary, the free dictionary

English

Noun

cadre (plural cadres)

• A frame or framework.
  • ✤ […] He took away the frame itself, as well as the notice.
    Mr. MacCulloch. I recollect Mr. Dobrée stating that his reason for taking the cadre was, that the notice was pasted, and that he could not unpaste it.¹
• (military) The framework or skeleton upon which a new regiment is to be formed; the officers of a regiment forming the staff.
  • ✤ From the original plan, thirty-four cadre battalions, with a total of 116 companies, had actually been formed, a total of about 700 officers and another 600 key enlisted men.²
• (chiefly in communism) The core of a managing group, or a member of such a group.
  • ✤ In an article concerning Yunnan, it pointed out that the efforts of the Nuchiang Lisu Autonomous Chou’s party committee had resulted in a doubling of minorities cadres since 1965, and that many of these persons had assumed the first and second positions in leadership squads at different levels.³
  • ✤ After the war, he was a party cadre and worked as a correspondent for the daily newspaper Zeri i Popullit (The People’s Voice).⁴
  • ✤ Finally, the exchange, circulation and education of local cadres constitute another key strategy implemented by the provincial leadership in its efforts to diffuse economic development into the backward inland region.⁵
  • ✤ Party cadres must guard against the temptations of power, money and sex.⁶
  • For more quotations using this term, see Citations:cadre.
• A small group of people specially trained for a particular purpose or profession.

Etymology

Borrowed from French cadre, from Italian quadro (“framed painting, square”), from Latin quadrum, from quattuor (“four”).

Pronunciation

• (Received Pronunciation) IPA: /ˈkɑː.də/, /ˈkɑː.dɹə/
• (US) IPA: /ˈkɑ.dɹeɪ/, /ˈkæd.ɹeɪ/, /ˈkɑ.dɹə/, /ˈkæd.ɹi/, /ˈkɑ.dɹi/, /ˈkɑ.dɚ/
• Audio (Australian): 🔊

Printed 2026-07-08.

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Footnotes

1. 1848, Parliamentary Papers, volume 27, page 283: ↩

2. 2002, Barry M. Stentiford, chapter 9, in The American Home Guard: the State Militia in the Twentieth Century, →ISBN, page 202: ↩

3. 1976, June Teufel Dreyer, China’s Forty Millions: Minority Nationalities and National Integration in the People’s Republic of China ‎${}^{[1]}$, Harvard University Press, →ISBN, →LCCN, →OCLC, →OL, page 242: ↩

4. 1986, Robert Elsie, Dictionary of Albanian Literature ‎${}^{[2]}$, page 101: ↩

5. 1997, Jae Ho Chung, edited by David S.G. Goodman, China’s Provinces in Reform: Class, community and political culture, Routledge, page 146: ↩

6. 2006, “China airbrushes Chen”, in Financial Times ‎${}^{[3]}$: ↩