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As far as I know, in United States students don't use exercise books.
Image 1. Exercise book
They use composition books instead, which often have "marble" cover and bound through the fold.
My question is which wording, exercise book or composition book, would be preferable if I generally prefer US wording, but I need to describe both US composition books and British (and European) exercise books?
Any book with blank lined paper (or grid paper) is called a notebook. In the US, we do have notebooks with paper covers like those "exercise books", but I'm not familiar with the term "exercise book" so I would probably assume that you were referring to a book filled with exercises for a student to complete (i.e., a workbook). The term "composition book" is known, but it would seem oddly specific to use it instead of just "notebook".
See also Common Types of Notebooks Explained
An exercise book in the UK is simply any blank notebook for the student to write in. It may be plain, ruled or squared/graphed. I've never heard of the term 'composition book', ever. Even the ones for music class with pre-printed staves were still called exercise books… even though we were learning composition.
They would be most commonly be simply stapled in the middle, like a magazine, but the type of binding doesn't really dictate the name. Generally they're all exercise books, for doing exercises [work] in.
Older students would often transition to loose-leaf ring-binders.
[This from when Noah was a boy; I presume everybody has an iPad or laptop these days;)
Strangely, as soon as you leave school you never use the term exercise book ever again. It seems very school-specific. It's a term I hadn't even thought about in decades, until I saw your question.
