oboe
UK/ˈəʊbəʊ//ˈoʊboʊ/
oboe noun: 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.
Noun (1)
oboe (plural oboes)
- 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.1990, Francis Bebey, African music: a people's art, page 64
- This does become monstrously antimusical in one scene: when Tchaikovsky’s music, softly depicting the sleeping palace (my favorite passage of this composer’s entire oeuvre, with its beautifully muffled oboe melody suggesting how beauty ripens in sleep like a chrysalis), is turned into an epic...2007 June 4, Alastair Macaulay, “Wake Up, Princess, the Movies Are Calling”, in The New York Times
Noun (2) capitalized: OBOE
OBOE (plural OBOEs)
- Initialism of off-by-one error.
Noun (3) capitalized: Oboe
Oboe
- radiotelephony clear-code word for the letter O.
- Synonyms:
- Oscar
oboe meaning in Tagalog, Arabic, Indonesian and Persian
oboe in Tagalog
- wind instrument
- obo
oboe in Arabic
- wind instrument
- أُوبُوَا ʔūbuwā
oboe in Indonesian
- wind instrument
- obo
oboe in Persian
- wind instrument
- ابوا, قرهنی
More languagesFewer languages
- oboe in Vietnamese
- kèn ôboa
Examples of oboe in a sentence
- The oboe overblows at the octave; the clarinet at the twelfth.
- I will accompany her on the oboe.
- The dulzaina was a double-reed folk instrument, similar to the oboe, which comes from north-central Spain.
Synonyms of oboe
Forms of oboe
| plural | oboes |
|---|---|
| plural | OBOEs |
Origin of oboe
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”).
Words formed from oboe
- baroque oboe
- bass oboe
- contrabass oboe
- oboe da caccia
- oboe di caccia
- oboe d’amore
- oboeist
- oboelike
- oboe-player
- oboist
- piccolo oboe
- pink oboe
Phrases with oboe
Words that rhyme with oboe
Questions about oboe
- What does oboe mean?
- Oboe means 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.
- What is oboe in Tagalog?
- Oboe in Tagalog is obo. See Oboe meaning in Tagalog.
- What part of speech is oboe?
- Oboe is a noun.
- How do you pronounce oboe?
- Oboe is pronounced /ˈəʊbəʊ/ (UK).
- What is the plural of oboe?
- The plural of oboe is oboes.
Words near oboe in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: oboe (page history and authors); OBOE (page history and authors); Oboe (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:
Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-us-oboe.ogg.
Cite this entry: “oboe.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/oboe. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.