Half note the earlier black notation resembles the modern quarter note (crotchet). The Greek, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean names mean "half", and in Greek, the modern word ("miso" – μισό) and older ("imisi" – ήμισι) are used. Half note In music, a half note (American) or minim (British) is a note played for half the duration of a whole note (or semibreve) and twice the duration of a quarter note (or crotchet). It was given its Latin name ("minima", meaning "least or smallest") because it was the shortest of the five note values used in early medieval music notation . In time
Note value duration, as at the end of a piece (e.g. at the end of Mozart's Mass KV 192). A single eighth note, or any faster note, is always stemmed with flags, while two or more are usually beamed in groups. When a stem is present, it can go either up (from the right side of the note head) or down (from the left side), except in the cases of the "longa" or "maxima" which are nearly always written with downward stems. In most cases, the stem goes down if the notehead is on the center line or above, and up otherwise.