Quarters

How to spell quarters

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce quarters

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does quarters mean?

1. nounThe rooms or accommodation assigned to people, especially soldiers, staff, or servants.
2. nounSeveral twenty-five-cent coins, each worth a fourth of a dollar.
3. nounFour equal parts into which something is divided.

Quarters in a sentence

• The officers returned to their quarters after the long march.

• She fed three quarters into the parking meter before her appointment.

• He sliced the sandwich into neat quarters for the children.

• The live-in housekeeper had comfortable quarters above the garage.

• The laundromat machines accept only quarters and dollar bills.

• The recipe asks you to cut each apple into quarters before baking.

Where does quarters come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word descends from the Latin quartus, meaning 'fourth', which in turn grew from quattuor, the Latin word for 'four'. By the medieval period it had passed into Old French as quartier and then into English in the 1300s, where a 'quarter' was literally one of the four equal parts into which something could be divided. From that mathematical sense the word branched out remarkably: a quarter of a town became a district, a quarter of a year became a financial period, and 'quarters' in the plural came to mean the lodgings where soldiers and servants were stationed, since troops were once billeted by being assigned to distinct parts of a town. The same quattuor root still lives openly in 'quart', 'quartet' and 'quadrant', which is a useful reminder that the tricky middle of the word is 'quart', not 'quort'.

How the word is built

• quart- (from Latin quartus: fourth)
• -er (noun-forming)
• -s (plural)