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lute

UK/l(j)uːt/US/lut/
nounC1Occasional — familiar, but not everyday · #11,463 of 15,258leans written

Other forms: lutes

A lute is an old pear-shaped plucked instrument with a bent neck. Play the lute, a lute song, tune the lute.

The neck is bent back so the strings can be at tension without a heavy head, and the body is built from thin curved staves like a barrel, which makes it very light. Keeping it in tune was a standing joke: a lutenist was said to spend half a life tuning.

Ching · CC BY 2.0

Definitions of lute

  1. 1nounluteAn old pear-shaped plucked instrument with a bent neck.C1

    “In the painting, a young man plays a lute and sings to a lady.”

lute is an instrument.

Where it comes from

Arabic al-ud, the wood, reached English through Occitan and French. Oud is the same instrument and word.

  1. Arabic

    عود — wood

  2. Old Occitan

    laüt

  3. Old French

    leut

  4. Middle French

    lut

  5. English, today

    lute

From Middle French lut (modern luth), from Old French leut, probably from Old Occitan laüt, from Arabic عود (“wood”) (probably representing an xaa - or North African pronunciation). a doublet of oud and lavta and laouto.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in Music & Instruments

Practise this word

lute in the wild

  • As a small instrument, the lute produces a relatively quiet sound.

    Lute

  • The oud is similar to other types of lute, and to Western lutes which developed out of the Medieval Islamic oud.

    Oud

  • The oud, as a fundamental difference with the western lute, has no frets and a smaller neck.

    Oud

  • The theorbo is a plucked string instrument of the lute family, with an extended neck that houses the second pegbox.

    Theorbo

  • Like a lute, a theorbo has a curved-back sound box with a flat top, typically with one or three sound holes decorated with rosettes.

    Theorbo

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From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.