Word.ws English Dictionary

haut-boy

haut-boy is the obsolete spelling of hautboy.

Meaning of hautboy

Noun

hautboy (plural hautboys)

  1. (dated) An oboe or similar treble double reed instrument.
    • I […] told John a Gaunt he beat his own name; for you might have thrust him and all his apparel into an eel-skin; the case of a treble hautboy was a mansion for him, a court […]c. 1596–1599 (date written), William Shakespeare, “The Second Part of Henry the Fourth, […]. Epilogue.”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […]...
  2. A reed stop on an organ giving a similar sound.
  3. A tall-growing strawberry, Fragaria elatior, having a musky flavor.
    • In May we have strawberries, which continue in season two or three months. These are of the wood kind; very grateful, and of a good flavour; but the scarlets and hautboys are not known at Nice.1766, Tobias Smollett, Travels through France and Italy, London: R. Baldwin, Volume 1, Letter 19, pp. 304-305

Forms of haut-boy

pluralhaut-boys

Questions about haut-boy

What is haut-boy the obsolete spelling of?
Haut-boy is the obsolete spelling of hautboy.

Words near haut-boy in the dictionary

  1. Hauswirths
  2. haut
  3. haut gout
  4. haut monde
  5. haut ton
  6. haut-boy
  7. haut-boys
  8. Haut-Katanga
  9. Haut-Lomami
  10. haut-pas
  11. Haut-Rhin

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: haut-boy (page history and authors); hautboy (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.

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