Half note

Half a whole note: two beats in 4/4 time. It equals two quarter notes or four eighth notes. The picture tells you that: a hollow (unfilled) head marks one of the long values, and the stem puts it one step below the whole note, which has no stem at all.

"Two beats" holds whenever the quarter note is the beat, as in 4/4 and 3/4. In 2/2, also called cut time, the half note itself is the beat, and conductors count it as one. How many seconds it lasts depends on the tempo: at a quarter-note tempo of 120 beats per minute a half note is exactly one second.

On a staff the stem points up from the right side when the head sits below the middle line and down from the left side when it sits above it; on the middle line it usually goes down, though neighbouring notes can flip it. Fonts usually draw this character stem-up, but a stem-down half note is the same note. A dot after it (𝅗𝅥𝅭, the dotted half note) adds half its length again, so it fills a whole bar of 3/4.

Why do the British call it a minim?

Minim and half note are two names for one note. North American English says half note; British, Irish and Australian usage says minim, from Latin minima, "the smallest". That name is a fossil: when Italian and French musicians and theorists of the Ars nova (the early fourteenth-century movement that made rhythm far more precise) brought it in around 1300, it was the shortest value in existence, a black diamond with a tail, below the semibreve that we now call the whole note. During the fifteenth century scribes left the longer values hollow and filled only the shorter ones, so the minim became a hollow diamond, later rounded into today's oval. As ever shorter notes were invented beneath it, the "smallest" note stopped being small, but Britain kept the name.

Other languages chose different names. French blanche and Spanish blanca mean "white", for the hollow head; German halbe Note and Japanese 二分音符 count the fraction, like English; Italian minima and Portuguese mínima keep the Latin. Every one of them is the note 𝅗𝅥.

Will it show up if I send it?

Not always: fonts without this symbol show a box. The music symbols people actually send, ♩ ♪ ♫ ♬ and the emoji 🎵 🎶, are widely supported, but the text symbols are quarter and eighth notes and the emoji are generic music notes. There is no half note among them, so 𝅗𝅥 is Unicode's half-note character, and it sits in the Musical Symbols block that music fonts and some desktop fonts, such as Windows' Segoe UI Symbol, cover. As of 2026, expect a box or a blank on devices whose fonts lack it. Where you just want "music", send ♪ or 🎵; where you mean a half note in a lesson, a quiz or a chat with a music teacher, 𝅗𝅥 is right, and the reader may need a computer to see it.