Quarterly

How to spell quarterly

9 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce quarterly

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does quarterly mean?

1. adjectiveHappening or produced once every three months.
2. adverbOnce every three months; four times a year.
3. nounA magazine or journal that is published four times a year.

Quarterly in a sentence

• adjective

  The finance team prepares a quarterly report for the board.

• adverb

  Dividends are paid quarterly to all shareholders.

• noun

  She edits a respected literary quarterly on classic fiction.

• adjective

  Each tenant receives a quarterly statement of charges.

• adverb

  The heating system should be serviced quarterly to stay efficient.

• noun

  The academic quarterly accepts submissions twice a year.

Where does quarterly come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word builds on quarter, which English took in the early 1300s from the Old French quartier, itself from the Latin quartarius meaning 'a fourth part', a noun grown from quartus, the Latin for 'fourth'. A quarter therefore originally meant simply one of four equal divisions, whether of a coin, a town, or a year. By adding the native English suffix -ly, which signals 'at intervals of' (as in weekly and yearly), writers from the 1400s onward formed quarterly to describe something that happens once in each three-month quarter of the year. The familiar -er spelling in the middle traces straight back to that Latin quartarius and is the same -ter you see in quart and quarter. Knowing it is quarter plus -ly, rather than a separate root, helps fix the spelling: there is no doubling and no surprise vowel.

How the word is built

• quarter (a fourth part, from Latin quartus 'fourth')
• -ly (suffix forming adjective/adverb of recurrence)