  In 1962 M.J. Wicks gave a precise description of the form a commutator could
take in a free group or a free product and in 1973 extended this description to
cover a product of two squares. Subsequently, lists of "Wicks forms" were found
for arbitrary products of commutators and squares in free groups and free
products, by Culler, Vdovina and other authors. Here we construct Wicks forms
for products of commutators and squares in a hyperbolic group. As applications
we give explicit lists of forms for a commutator and for a square, and find
bounds on the lengths of conjugating elements required to express a quadratic
tuple of elements of a hyperbolic group as a Wicks form.
