Oboe
//ˈəʊbəʊ// noun
noun ·Moderate ·High school level
Definitions
Noun
- 1 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.
"Whistles, mirlitons, flutes, trumpets or horns, clarinets, and oboes are all played in one or more parts of the continent."
- 2 radiotelephony clear-code word for the letter O.
- 3 Initialism of off-by-one error. abbreviation, alt-of, initialism
- 4 a slender double-reed instrument; a woodwind with a conical bore and a double-reed mouthpiece wordnet
Example
More examples"Heck, with oboe players there are those who, rather than search for a reed that suits them, find it faster to make their own."
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”).
Related phrases
More for "oboe"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.