Word.ws English Dictionary

bandleader

bandleader noun: a musician who conducts or leads a band of musicians.

Noun

bandleader (plural bandleaders)

  1. A musician who conducts or leads a band of musicians.
    • Before Brooklyn became the World Historical Hipster Hub, there were the Hepsters of Harlem. And well before there was an Urban Dictionary for every last nuance of non-standard English, the bandleader and amateur linguist Cab Calloway cataloged some of the unique speech of the 1930s and ’40s in his...2010 July 9, J. David Goodman, “Of Local History and Hepcats”, in New York Times City Room, archived from the original on 20 Feb 2025
    • By and large back then, bassists weren’t bandleaders; Mingus was an anomaly.2024 May 1, Marcus J. Moore, “5 Minutes That Will Make You Love Jazz Bass”, in The New York Times, archived from the original on 06 Jun 2024
    Synonyms:
    conductor

Synonyms of bandleader

Forms of bandleader

pluralbandleaders
alternative formband leader

Origin of bandleader

From band + leader.

Questions about bandleader

What does bandleader mean?
Bandleader means a musician who conducts or leads a band of musicians.
What part of speech is bandleader?
Bandleader is a noun.
What is the plural of bandleader?
The plural of bandleader is bandleaders.

Words near bandleader in the dictionary

  1. bandkid
  2. bandkids
  3. bandkini
  4. bandkinis
  5. bandle
  6. bandleader
  7. bandleaders
  8. bandleading
  9. bandles
  10. bandless
  11. bandlessness

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: bandleader (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated:

Cite this entry: “bandleader.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/bandleader. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.