Word.ws English Dictionary

street piano

street piano noun: a piano placed in a public area to encourage passers-by to stop and play.

street piano: a piano placed in a public area to encourage passers-by to stop and play
Image: Richard Croft, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Noun

street piano (plural street pianos)

  1. A piano placed in a public area to encourage passers-by to stop and play.
  2. (historical) A mechanical piano used by street entertainers, operated with a crank that turned a wooden cylinder from which leather hammers were thrown against the strings.
    • Who that has lived thirty years in the world has not discovered that Pleasure is coy; and must not be too directly pursued, but must be caught unawares? An air from a street-piano, heard while at work, will often gratify more than the choicest music played at a concert by the most accomplished...1854, Herbert Spencer, “Manners and Fashion”, in Essays: Scientific, Political, and Speculative, London: Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans, and Roberts, published 1858, page 148
    • I keep my countenance, / I remain self-possessed / Except when a street piano, mechanical and tired / Reiterates some worn-out common song […]1916, T. S. Eliot, “Portrait of a Lady”, in Alfred Kreymborg, editor, Others: An Anthology of the New Verse, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, page 36
    Synonyms:
    barrel piano

Synonyms of street piano

Forms of street piano

pluralstreet pianos

Questions about street piano

What does street piano mean?
Street piano means a piano placed in a public area to encourage passers-by to stop and play.
What part of speech is street piano?
Street piano is a noun.
What is the plural of street piano?
The plural of street piano is street pianos.

Words near street piano in the dictionary

  1. street performances
  2. street performer
  3. street performers
  4. street pharmacist
  5. street pharmacists
  6. street piano
  7. street pianos
  8. street pigeon
  9. street pigeons
  10. street queen
  11. street queens

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: street piano (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: “street piano.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/street_piano. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.