In a Word: Four Quarters Make a Story

Senior managing editor and logophile Andy Hollandbeck reveals the sometimes surprising roots of common English words and phrases. Remember: Etymology tells us where a word comes from, but not what it means today.

The word quarter to indicate one-fourth of a thing traces back to the Latin quartus “fourth part.” Though quarter may seem innocuous, its earliest printed uses in English, around 1300, were in reference to one-fourth of a human body that had been dismembered during execution — that is, to a piece of someone who had been quartered.

But since then — and honestly even before then — we have divided many things into fourths: the first and third quarter phases of the moon, the quarter-dollar coin (i.e., the quarter), quarter notes, quarter hours, quarter miles. Even football’s quarterback — originally positioned between the center and the halfback — comes from a little on-field math.

Towns and cities were also divided into quarters, based on the race, class, or nationality of who lived there. New Orleans’ French Quarter — the entire district is a National Heritage Landmark — is one of the more famous city quarters in the United States. But as cities grew, they don’t always get divvied up into only four sections, so in lieu of constantly renaming what the different districts were to align with the total number of recognized areas, a sense of the word quarter drifted off to describe any section of a town where a specific cohort of people live.

And then the link to towns and cities faded, too. In the 1500s, we got military quarters, and in the 1700s, we see slaves’ quarters — originally the section of land where these people were domiciled, but it drifted even further. Soon quarters could be used to describe the individual building or even room designated for someone’s use.

(It’s likely from this sense that we get the military concept of giving no quarter — that is, instead of giving them quarters, a place to rest and a roof over their heads, enemies are immediately executed.)

So there is the progression from one fourth of a thing to one section of town to someone’s assigned lodgings. And to give you a fourth quarter to round out this whole story, I leave you with this: No, a quarter horse isn’t one-fourth the size of a regular horse; it’s a type of racehorse bred to run at top speed for short distances, namely in a quarter-mile race.