American vs British Music Terms

Music is written the same way all over the world: a crotchet in London looks exactly like a quarter note in New York. Only the names differ. American English, along with Canada and much of the rest of the world, uses names based on fractions. British English, along with Australia, Ireland, New Zealand and South Africa, keeps older names that go back to medieval music.

If you’ve been taught one system and you’re reading a book or video that uses the other, this chart is your translation.

Note names

Note	American	British	Beats in 4/4
	Whole note	Semibreve	4
	Half note	Minim	2
	Quarter note	Crotchet	1
	Eighth note	Quaver	½
	Sixteenth note	Semiquaver	¼

Shorter notes follow the same patterns:

American	British
Thirty-second note	Demisemiquaver
Sixty-fourth note	Hemidemisemiquaver
Double whole note	Breve

The American names are easy to work out, because each is a fraction of a whole note: two half notes make a whole note, two quarter notes make a half note, and so on. The British names have to be learned, but the shorter ones follow a pattern. Semi means half, demi means half again and hemi means half once more, so a hemidemisemiquaver is half of a half of a half of a quaver.

Rests

Rests take the same names as the notes they match.

American	British
Whole rest	Semibreve rest
Half rest	Minim rest
Quarter rest	Crotchet rest
Eighth rest	Quaver rest
Sixteenth rest	Semiquaver rest

Dotted notes

A dot works the same way in both systems: it adds half the note’s length. Only the name changes.

American	British	Beats in 4/4
Dotted half note	Dotted minim	3
Dotted quarter note	Dotted crotchet	1½
Dotted eighth note	Dotted quaver	¾

Other music terms

American	British	What it means
Measure	Bar	One group of beats between two bar lines. Americans say “bar” too, so both are understood in the US.
Staff	Stave	The five lines music is written on. “Staff” is common in Britain as well.
Half step	Semitone	The smallest step: from one piano key to the very next, black or white.
Whole step	Tone	Two half steps (two semitones).
Bar line	Bar line	The same in both.
Time signature	Time signature	The same in both.

Where the British names come from

The British names are the original ones. They come from medieval music, when notes were named in Latin and French, and long notes were the norm:

• Breve comes from the Latin brevis, “short”. It really was a short note once, before music slowed down and longer notes fell out of use.
• Semibreve means “half a breve”.
• Minim comes from the Latin minima, “smallest”. It was once one of the shortest notes in use.
• Crotchet comes from the French crochet, “small hook”, from the shape of the early note.
• Quaver comes from an old English word meaning to trill, or to sing with a wavering voice.

The fraction-based names spread in the United States in the 1800s, following the German way of naming notes as fractions of a whole: Viertelnote, “quarter note”. Both systems are correct. They’re just two languages for the same symbols.

Which does Trebly use?

Trebly uses the American names throughout: whole, half, quarter and eighth notes, and measures. On the note values page, each British name is given in brackets the first time, so you can use either. The note value chart lists every note and rest on one printable page.