Why foolscap paper is called foolscap

Learn More About foolscap. Time Traveler for foolscap The first known use of foolscap was in See more words from the same year. Listen to Our Podcast About foolscap. Get Word of the Day delivered to your inbox! Sign Up. Statistics for foolscap Look-up Popularity. Style: MLA. Get Word of the Day daily email! Test Your Vocabulary. Test your vocabulary with our question quiz! I probably filled the odd foolscap page with titles myself. That DOES give the impression of a very wordy, obsessive first draft.

I also went to grade school in Canada in the early eighties , and we used foolscap a great deal. My Engineer Battalion, as part of a fair-sized Task Force, occupied part of a twelve story office building once part of the Baathist beaurocracy.

One of their offices was the Bureau of Information, or something near to that in translation. Anyway, for some weeks, until the vast amount of office debris was finally cleared away, with the help of workers from the al-Sadr neighborhood, many of us were able to pick through the office trash, including old typewriters, documents both typed and hand-written, personal effects, potted plants, and so forth.

I do not remember coming across anything ressembling the above descriptions of foolscap. Sometimes the cross-hatch paper that students in the Third World and Europe use for trigonometry, geometry, etc. A Program Committee would select the music.

It was all freshly written out on sheets of yellow foolscap…. I would like ream of quarto Imperial etc. The standard was being forced by the Typewriter now the computer printer. I think making paper-aeroplanes first introduced to the world of paper formats and dimensions.

It seems quite unexceptional to me — growing up in Australia, it was simply one of the standard paper sizes. If your preferred feed is Twitter, you can follow languagehat to get links to new posts here as they appear.

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Why the paper size is called a fools-cap? Asked 3 years, 8 months ago. Active 3 years, 8 months ago. Viewed times. Improve this question. Add a comment. Active Oldest Votes. Improve this answer. Nor did every paper mill use the same watermarks, of which there were hundreds of designs available.

There is an apocryphal story that the foolscap watermark design originated in the English Rump Parliament when Oliver Cromwell ordered that it be used to replace the royal arms on the paper used for the journals of Parliament. This is rather far-fetched since the foolscap watermark had already been in use for nearly two hundred years by that time. The paper used for Parliamentary record-keeping was called foolscap in later years for the simple reason that was the paper size which had been chosen.

Cromwell had nothing to do with it. It was not until into the eighteenth century that European paper makers began to standardize paper sizes and use specific watermarks to designate those sizes. They chose watermarks which were well-known and had been in use for many years. In addition to foolscap, other watermarks which denoted sizes were crown, hand, post and pott.

About , in England, the foolscap watermark was replaced by the figure of Britannia, even though the paper size continued to be referred to as foolscap. All of these variations of foolscap were actually some of the smaller paper sizes available during the Regency. Paper for printing could be sold by the ream , which was sheets for most of the nineteenth century, or more often by the bale, which was ten reams.

Writing paper could be sold in flat sheets, by the ream. But during the Regency, it was more commonly sold folded, usually in half, by the quire. A quire at that time was 24 sheets, or one-twentieth of a ream. Drawing paper of any size was typically sold flat, often by the sheet, though it was also available by the quire and the ream.

Foolscap was popular with Regency letter writers presumably because it had a generous surface upon which much could be written before the sheet was folded down to be addressed and sealed. But it was not unmanageably large nor would it be difficult to store in a desk drawer, especially if obtained in the folded format. A pen knife could easily slice through the fold when a smaller sheet was needed. Foolscap, as one of the smaller paper sizes, would also be relatively economical to purchase.

It is quite possible that the perception of foolscap as a poor quality paper may stem from a doggerel poem attributed to Benjamin Franklin. In this poem, Franklin compares different types of men with different types of paper. His stanza on foolscap reads:.