[[Berkas:Portrait of Karl Pearson.jpg|thumb|Foto Karl Pearson.]]
The terms lower quartile and upper quartile were coined by ''Sir'' Donald MacAlister in 1879 with the publication of ''The Law of the Geometric Mean'' .
Istilah kuartil bawah dan kuartil atas pertama kali diperkenalkan oleh ''Sir'' Donald MacAlister pada tahun 1879 pada publikasi berjudul ''The Law of the Geometric Mean''. Sementara itu, istilah jangkauan interdesil dan interkuartil pertama kali dicetuskan oleh Francis Galton pada tahun 1882 pada publikasi berjudul ''Report of the Anthropometric Committee'', meskipun ide tentang jangkauan interkuartil sebenarnya pernah dicetuskan oleh Carl Friedrich Gauss dan Adolphe Quételet.
The terms interdecil and interquartile intervals were coined by Francis Galton in 1882 with the publication of ''Report of the Anthropometric Committee'' , although the idea of interquartile intervals appeared earlier in the works of Carl Friedrich Gauss and Adolphe Quételet . Galton organized the observations in ascending order of magnitude and took the necessary fractions from each end, using interpolation to obtain the exact cut points.
Galton recognized the greater stability of the most central quantiles and used interquartile ranges as descriptive statistics. Based on the formulas for covariance between sample quantiles, Karl Pearson pointed out that while the semi-interquartile rangehas the advantage of directly estimating the probable error, other pairs of symmetrically spaced sample quantiles can provide more efficient variability estimators in the normal case.
