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The Common ToneWhere the Sacred and the Profane Share the Same Cup
The Common Tone · Visual Language of Music
Mordent A short sharp zigzag of three peaks with a vertical stroke through its center, sitting above a notehead.

Mordent

also called: lower mordent · upper mordent · inverted mordent · pralltriller

A short zigzag ornament above a note telling you to snap quickly between the written note and one of its immediate neighbors.

What you do

Play a fast three-note flick — written note, neighbor, written note — landing back on the main note almost at once. With a vertical line through the zigzag, the neighbor is the note BELOW; without the line, most modern editions mean the note ABOVE. It decorates the attack; the beat placement of the written note doesn't move.

In context

Mordent — example A short engraved phrase. Above its second note sits a mordent: a compact zigzag with a vertical line through it. The phrase ends on a held note. Engraved by Verovio 6.2.1-8d42439
A lined mordent over the second note: under most modern usage the line through the zigzag means a fast flick to the LOWER neighbor and back, decorating the attack without moving the beat. That is one reading — ornament names have flipped across centuries and countries, and the edition's own ornament table always outranks this rule.

Don’t confuse with

trill
A trill (tr, often with a longer wavy line) keeps oscillating for the note's duration; a mordent is a single quick flick — one round trip, then hold.
turn
The turn is a smooth sideways-S telling you to circle the note from above AND below (four or five notes); the mordent's sharp zigzag visits one neighbor only.

Convention varies

Ornament naming is historically unstable — which mark is "the mordent" and which is the "inverted" one has flipped across centuries, countries, and editors, and Baroque realization differs from modern shorthand. The safe rule is visual — line through the zigzag = lower neighbor; no line = upper neighbor in most modern usage — and the edition's own ornament table outranks any general rule.

See also

trill · turn

For specialists

SMuFL: ornamentMordent
Record status: draft — verification pending (bookshelf locators + chord-symbol authority; OQ-1 blocks the slice gate)