The relativistic quark model is presented. The quark‐antiquark potential for the Schro¨dinger‐like equation is constructed with the account of retardation effects and one‐loop radiative corrections. It consists of the one‐gluon exchange part and the confining part which is the mixture of the Lorentz scalar and Lorentz vector contributions. The latter contains both the Dirac and Pauli terms. In thev2/c2approximation the mass spectra of heavy quarkonia (charmonium and bottomonium) are calculated in good agreement with experiment. In the case of heavy‐light mesons (BandD) the light quark is treated completely relativistically and only the expansion in the inverse heavy quark mass is used. The mass spectra of the ground and excited states ofD,Ds,B,Bsmesons are calculated. They exhibit some features of the so‐called “level inversion.” The obtained results are generally in accord with experimental data. Still there exist some discrepancies between measurements of different collaborations. © 2002 American Institute of Physics