THEORY 68: Chord Name Confusion
I touched on this back in THEORY 14.
It is a topic with reoccurs in my guitar shop with customers. Most are confused - and this is not surprising because the system is fraught (the system being the set of rules and conventions propped up by the majority of published books, articles etc. plus the banter between recognised authorities online).
In THEORY 14 I had a rant about the naming discrepancies that occur when the same interval extension appears in a Major, Minor or Dominant context.
In this article I am going to focus on the lack of adherence to the precise number of an interval as per its octave.
Chord names are derived from the intervals used in their construction but frustratingly not always in a clear and consistent way.
So as a student comes to terms with the interval names and gradually commits them to memory, it follows that they will understandably carry across this understanding, terminology and familiarity to the three note chords and beyond.