Half note


In music, a half note or minim is a note played for half the duration of a whole note and twice the duration of a quarter note. It was given its Latin name because it was the shortest of the five note values used in early medieval music notation. In time signatures with 4 as the bottom number, such as or, the half note is two beats long. However, when 2 is the bottom number, the half note is one beat long.
Half notes are notated with a hollow oval notehead like a whole note and straight note stem with no flags like a quarter note. The half rest denotes a silence of the same duration. Half rests are drawn as filled-in rectangles sitting on top of the middle line of the musical staff, although in polyphonic music the rest may need to be moved to a different line or even a ledger line. As with all notes with stems, half notes are drawn with stems to the right of the notehead facing up when they are below the middle line of the staff. When they are on or above the middle line, they are drawn with stems on the left of the notehead facing down.
The American term half note is a 19th-century loan translation of German halbe Note.
The Catalan, French, and Spanish names derive from the fact that the minima was the shortest unfilled note in mensural white notation, which is true of the modern form as well. The form in the earlier black notation resembles the modern quarter note. The Greek, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean names mean "half", and in Greek, the modern word and older are used.