Other forms: quarters
A quarter is one of four equal parts of something. A quarter of a pizza, a quarter of an hour standing at the bus stop, quarter past nine on the kitchen clock.
Telling the time is where you meet it most: quarter past, quarter to, and in America a quarter after. It is also the American twenty-five-cent coin, the one that goes into a parking meter. Businesses cut the year into four quarters and report their money every three months. The quarter of a city is a district with a character of its own — the old quarter, the Latin Quarter — and in the plural, quarters are the rooms someone lives in, soldiers especially. One warning about the plural: with numbers you say three quarters of the class, not three quarter.
1nounfourOne of four equal parts of something.~56%
“He cut the apple into quarters and handed them round.”
synonyms: fourth
2nounquarterFifteen minutes; one fourth of an hour.~2%
“The train leaves at quarter past six.”
3nounperiodA period of three months in a company's or a country's financial year.~15%
“Sales rose again in the final quarter.”
4nouncoinA coin worth twenty-five cents in the United States and Canada.~5%
“She fed a quarter into the parking meter.”
5noundistrictA district of a city with a character of its own.~20%
“We got lost in the old quarter and ate somewhere better for it.”
synonyms: district
6nounroomsThe rooms provided for someone to live in, soldiers or crew especially.~2%
“The crew slept in cramped quarters below deck.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 23 sentences found in the wild and placed 19 of them on a sense (4 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
quarter is a fraction.
Quarter came through Anglo-Norman from Latin quartarius, a fourth part, built on quartus, 'fourth', and Middle English took it whole. Spanish kept the same word as cuarto, which still means both a quarter and a room — the same pairing English keeps in living quarters.
Middle English
quarter
English, today
quarter
From Middle English quarter. From Middle English quarter, from Anglo-Norman quarter, from Latin quartarius, from quartus. Compare Spanish cuarto (“room, quarters; quarter”). a doublet of quartier.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA