I'm no musician but I'm surprised the history of the note names hasn't been mentioned. (Or it has and I'm stupid/blind: disregard if so.)

Mediaeval music was slooow: modern recordings of Perotin's Viderunt omnes clock in at around thirty to sixty seconds per syllable. The word 'breve' of course means 'short'. It was the short note. It's now so long that (two full bars) that it's never seen for most instruments.

Then the monks got hyperactive or started taking drugs that speeded them up, or something, and needed a 'half-short' note too, the semibreve, the length of a full bar.

Then came yet another division of this. Two notes to a bar?? Were they mad? This was obviously the smallest note it was possible to have, so it was called the minim.

Beyond that they had to give up naming them realistically. Half a minim was called a crotchet, 'a little hook', because it looked like one.

Then quaver is self-explanatory: some radical modernist microtonal trill.

I don't know when semiquaver and its babies came in.