What does "quadtree" mean?

A treelike data structure each of whose nodes has up to four children, most often used to partition a two-dimensional space by recursively subdividing it.

Quadtree

noun

noun ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Noun

1
A treelike data structure each of whose nodes has up to four children, most often used to partition a two-dimensional space by recursively subdividing it.
"H.265 employs a more flexible quadtree structure that refines motion search."

Example

More examples

"H.265 employs a more flexible quadtree structure that refines motion search."

Etymology

From quad- + tree, coined by Raphael Finkel and J. L. Bentley in 1974.

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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.