kvartals

Kvartal is a term used in several Nordic and Central European languages to designate either a quarter of a calendar year or a city block. The meaning is determined by context: in business and statistics, a kvartal refers to a three-month period used for financial reporting and data analyses; in urban planning and real estate, a kvartal is a city block or a defined district bounded by streets. The term also appears in compound forms such as kvartalsrapport (quarterly report), kvartalsdata (quarterly data), and kvartalsvis (quarterly).

Etymology traces kvartal to the Latin quartus meaning “fourth,” a path that carries into various Germanic languages and into Scandinavian usage, where the sense of a quarter or a block has remained central in everyday language and professional terms.

Regional usage varies slightly by language. In Swedish and Norwegian, kvartal is commonly used for both the calendar quarter and the city block sense, with language-specific compounds clearly distinguishing quarterly material from geographic references. In other contexts, the same root appears in related terms that describe quarterly phenomena or quarterly administrative tasks.

Kvartals as a concept reflects two parallel organizational ideas: dividing time into regularly spaced intervals for reporting and planning, and dividing urban space into named or bounded blocks for governance, property management, and navigation. See also Quarter (time), City block, and Quarterly report.