In music, a quarter note (American) or crotchet (Commonwealth) is played for one quarter of the duration of a whole note. Quarter notes are notated with a filled-in oval note head and a straight, flagless stem. The stem usually points upwards if it is below the middle line of the stave or downwards if it is on or above the middle line. However, this may be changed if there is more than one part to differentiate between the parts. The head of the note also reverses its orientation in relation to the stem. (See image.) Music is a form of expression in the medium of time using the structures of tones and silence. ... Figure 1. ... Stems can refer to two things in music, relating to music notation and production. ... In musical notation, the staff or stave is a set of five horizontal lines on which note symbols are placed to indicate pitch and time. ... As a noun, a part is a section of a greater whole. ...

A quarter note with stem facing up, a quarter note with stem facing down, and a quarter rest.

A related symbol is the quarter rest (or crotchet rest). It denotes a silence of the same duration as a quarter note. Some describe the quarter rest as a "z joined to a c." It also looks somewhat like the Japanese kana So (そ). Image File history File links Quarter_notes_and_rest. ... Image File history File links Quarter_notes_and_rest. ... Japanese writing Kanji 漢字 Kana 仮名 Hiragana 平仮名 Katakana 片仮名 Manyogana 万葉仮名 Uses Furigana 振り仮名 Okurigana 送り仮名 Rōmaji ローマ字 For other meanings of Kana, see Kana (disambiguation). ... そ, in hiragana, or ソ in katakana, is one of the Japanese kana, which each represent one mora. ...

The note derives from the semiminima of mensural notation. The word crotchet comes from Old French crochet, meaning 'little hook', diminutive of croc, 'hook', because of the hook used on the note in black notation. However, because the hook appeared on the eighth note in the later white notation, the modern French term croche refers to an eighth note. The term quarter note is a loan translation of German Viertelnote. Menstrual notation is the musical notation system which was used from the later part of the 13th century until about 1600. ... Old French is a term sometimes used to refer to the langue doïl, the continuum of varieties of Romance language spoken in territories corresponding roughly to the northern half of modern France and parts of Belgium and Switzerland during the period roughly from 1000 to 1300 A.D... Crochet Hooks The word crochet is derived from the Middle French word croc or croche, meaning It describes the process of creating fabric from a length of cord, yarn, or thread with a Crochet hook. ... Figure 1. ... Calque In linguistics, a calque ([kælk]) or loan translation (itself a calque of German Lehnübersetzung) consists of the borrowing of a phrase from one language into another, in the process of which individual words native to the borrowing language semantically match the individual words in the source language. ...

The names of this note (and rest) in European languages vary greatly:

The French, Italian and Spanish names for the note (all meaning "black") derive from the fact that the semiminima was the longest note to be colored in mensural white notation, which is true as well of the modern form.