Etymology of Quick Response Code

Naming in 1994

The team led by Masahiro Hara at Denso Wave chose the name Quick Response Code to record the design objective the symbology was built to satisfy: rapid decoding of a substantial payload independent of the orientation in which the symbol presents to a scanner. The descriptor distinguished the new symbology from the one-dimensional barcodes then in widespread use in Japanese automotive manufacturing, whose decoding behavior was slow by comparison and required careful scanner alignment.

Quick Response, in full

The phrase Quick Response is descriptive rather than proprietary in origin. It denotes the scanner's response time when encountering a symbol. The further phrase Code records the symbology's status as an encoded representation of data — that is, a machine-readable label rather than an image.

Subsequent shortening

In the years following its public release, the full term was widely contracted to the initialism QR Code, which Denso Wave subsequently registered as a trademark. The contraction is informal in origin and entered general usage organically. The full term remains the formal name of the symbology and is preferred in technical and institutional reference.