breves

Breves is a term with several related meanings in music, typography, and linguistics, all deriving from the Latin brevis meaning short or brief. In musical notation, a breve (plural breves) is a double whole note, longer than a semibreve (whole note). In modern notation the breve is relatively rare and tends to appear in early music editions or specialised scores. Its historical use varied with the mensural system, but in practical terms a breve can be described as two whole notes, or eight quarter notes in common time, depending on the context.

In typography, a breve is a diacritic mark shaped like a small curved arc placed over a letter. It is used in several languages to indicate a particular vowel quality, often a shorter or distinct vowel sound. Examples include the Romanian letter ă (a with a breve) and the Turkish g-breve letter ğ. The breve diacritic is distinct from other diacritics such as the acute or circumflex and is named after its curved, “short” appearance.

Etymology and usage notes: the word breve comes from Latin brevis, meaning short. The plural form breves appears in Latin and is encountered in scholarly discussions of music history and linguistics. While the musical sense remains a defined term in theory, the diacritic sense is common in orthography for several languages and in typographic design when rendering specific alphabets.