oboe
/ˈoʊboʊ/
Word Rarity
Rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 2.69 in modern English
6
Scrabble Score
4
Letters
2
Syllables
3
Unique Chars
Meaning
noun
A soprano and melody wind instrument in the modern orchestra and wind ensemble. It is a smaller instrument and generally made of grenadilla wood. It is a member of the double reed family.
noun
radiotelephony clear-code word for the letter O.
noun
Example Sentences
- "Whistles, mirlitons, flutes, trumpets or horns, clarinets, and oboes are all played in one or more parts of the continent."
- "This does become monstrously antimusical in one scene: when Tchaikovsky’s music, softly depicting the sleeping palace (my favorite passage of this composer’s entire oeuvre, with its beautifully muffled oboe melody suggesting how beauty ripens in sleep like a chrysalis), is turned into an epic battle for the poor passive Prince, conducted between the wicked Carabosse, with her ghoulish minions, and the Lilac Fairy, with her elves."
- "Using the “endangered species” model employed by the World Wide Fund for Nature, campaigners are highlighting the scarcity of bassoonists and paving the way for the promotion of some other orchestral instruments that are under threat, such as the oboe, French horn, viola, trombone and double bass."
Etymology
An earlier form in English is hautboy, but the spelling oboe was adopted into English ca. 1770 from the Italian oboè, a transliteration in that language's orthography of the 17th-century pronunciation of the French word hautbois, a compound word made of haut (“high, loud, high-pitched”) and bois (“wood, woodwind”).
Regional Pronunciation
- American English: /ˈoʊboʊ/
- British English: /ˈəʊbəʊ/
Inflected Forms
Derived Forms
Phrases
baroque oboe
bass oboe
contrabass oboe
oboe da caccia
oboe di caccia
oboe d’amore
oboe-player
piccolo oboe