Skip to main content
QRSenBuilt for business
Core Concepts

What Does QR Stand For?

QR stands for "Quick Response" — named for the code's core design goal of being decoded at high speed, which mattered enormously for its original use tracking parts on a fast-moving automotive assembly line.

The name comes directly from Denso Wave's 1994 design brief: the barcodes used for parts tracking at the time were too slow to scan and held too little data. Engineer Masahiro Hara set out to build something a scanner could read near-instantly even at speed, and the finder-pattern design that resulted became the QR code.