Disclosed is a method for four-path tree structured vector quantization, comprising: (a) placing codebook vectors where magnitudes of vectors are arranged in order at lowermost nodes; (b) configuring upper nodes by averaging vector values of the lowermost adjacent four nodes; (c) calculating mean square errors to paths of the upper nodes (A, B, C, and D) corresponding to four paths from an input vector ‘X’; (d) presetting a threshold between 0 and 1 after the ‘(c)’; (e) calculating thresholds between the input vector ‘X’ and four paths ‘A’, ‘B’, ‘C’, and ‘D’, based on the mean square errors; and (f) comparing the thresholds calculated in the ‘(d)’ with the preset threshold to select a path having a threshold greater than the preset threshold, in which dynamic four-path tree structured vector quantization is used instead of conventional dynamic two-path tree structured vector quantization, thereby more efficiently and quickly searching a codebook.