Skip to content
ARCHIEENGLISH
LearnPlayWordsRanking
  • Learn
  • Play
  • Words
  • Ranking
  • Mine
← Vocabulary

sitar

US/ˈsɪtɑɹ/
nounC1Rare in speech; mostly a word you read · #12,391 of 15,258leans written

Other forms: sitars

A sitar is a long-necked Indian instrument with sympathetic strings. Play the sitar, a sitar recital, the sound of the sitar.

Under the played strings run a dozen more that nobody touches: they vibrate in sympathy and give the instrument its shimmer. The frets are curved and movable, which lets a player bend one note across several. Ravi Shankar brought it to Western audiences.

unknown, MET museum · CC0

Definitions of sitar

  1. 1nounsitarA long-necked Indian instrument with sympathetic strings.C1

    “He studied the sitar for years with a master in Varanasi.”

sitar is an instrument.

Where it comes from

Hindi sitar comes from Persian sehtar, meaning three strings, though the instrument now has many more.

  1. fa-cls

    سه‌تار

  2. Urdu

    ستار

  3. Hindi

    सितार

  4. English, today

    sitar

From Hindi सितार / Urdu ستار, from fa-cls سه‌تار literally “three strings”. a doublet of setar.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in Music & Instruments

Practise this word

sitar in the wild

  • According to most historians, he developed the sitar from the setar, an Iranian instrument of Abbasid or Safavid origin.

    Sitar

  • At age 18, he gave up dancing to pursue a career in music, studying the sitar for seven years under court musician Allauddin Khan.

    Ravi Shankar

  • Shankar engaged Western music by writing compositions for sitar and orchestra and touring the world in the 1970s and 1980s.

    Ravi Shankar

  • The track features a sitar part, played by lead guitarist George Harrison, that marked the first appearance of the Indian string instrument on a Western rock recording.

    Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)

  • When recording the track, Harrison was asked by Lennon to add a sitar part to the song.

    Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)

1 / 3

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.