Is 四分の一 a natural way of referring to "a quarter" as in "a three-month duration"? Is a natural way of referring to "a quarter" as in "a three-month duration" (usually e.g. January-March, April-June, July-September, or October-November) in Japanese? Japanese Stack Overflow uses on its users page to mean "quarter" in this sense, but that looks kind of strange to me. I know that means "one quarter" as in "one fourth" or "25%", but can it also be used (without any other qualifiers, like ) to mean "a three-month duration"? Also, while we're here, what is the most natural way of referring to "a quarter" in this sense? I'm aware of ; is that the best option?

I agree that "" in the current _Users_ page of Japanese SE is weird.

is a technical term that is exclusively used in financial reports, business plans, tax calculation, etc. Generally speaking, you can't use in casual/private situations, and you have to use "141" or "3" instead:

> 141
> = 13
> ([*] -- Weird)

However can explicitly mean the year is delimited into four at the beginning of months. Only by using can people notice the current started on October 1st, and the rep count for this will end at the end of 2014. If we used "3" instead, people would interpret it as "the last 3 months", which is not the case.

So I think is the best word that describes the SE's rule, although it may look a bit stiff.