Other forms: oboes
An oboe is a slim woodwind with a double reed and a nasal tone. Play the oboe, an oboe solo, the oboe's A.
The orchestra tunes to it because its pitch is the most stable and its tone cuts through. Players make their own reeds, since a bought one rarely suits, and that work takes as much time as practice. The name comes from the French for high wood.
1nounoboeA slim woodwind with a double reed and a nasal tone.
“The oboe played a sad, reedy tune over the soft strings.”
oboe is an instrument.
Italian oboe comes from French hautbois, high wood, from haut, high, plus bois, wood.
Italian
oboè
English, today
oboe
Built from
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”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA