Recent findings on the spectrum of heavy‐quark mesons from computer simulations of quarks and gluons in lattice QCD are summarized, with particular attention to quark‐antiquark states bound by an excited gluon field. The validity of a Born‐Oppenheimer treatment for such systems is discussed. Recent results on glueball masses, the light‐quark 1−+hybrid meson mass, and the static three‐quark potential are summarized. © 2003 American Institute of Physics