Trombone
noun, verb, slang ·Common ·High school level
Definitions
- 1 A musical instrument in the brass family, having a cylindrical bore, and usually a sliding tube (but sometimes piston valves, and rarely both). Most often refers to the tenor trombone, which is the most common type of trombone and has a fundamental tone of B♭ˌ (contra B♭).
"Jim plays the trombone very well."
- 2 a brass instrument consisting of a long tube whose length can be varied by a U-shaped slide wordnet
- 3 The common European bittern.
- 4 A kind of extendable support for attaching lighting elements to a set.
"The trombone […] permits an instrument to be positioned over a studio set wall, enabling the set wall to support the weight of the instrument."
- 1 To transmit a signal or data back to a central switching point before sending it out to its destination.
- 2 To extend and retract (the zoom lens); to use it too enthusiastically. slang, transitive
"[…] do things wrong (like rotating the lens turret while shooting or backwinding and doing multiple passes on the same strip of film or doing in-camera fades with the variable shutter or tromboning a zoom lens like a teenager on acid, etc., etc., etc.) […]"
Example
More examples"You're mistaken. He plays bass, not trombone."
Etymology
Borrowed from Italian trombone, from tromba (“trumpet”) + -one (augmentative), literally “large trumpet”. The telecommunications sense alludes to the shape of the musical instrument.
Related phrases
More for "trombone"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.