overwordExplorer
ENGLISH · A WORD WITH POSSIBILITIES

oboe.

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.

4 characters2 syllables approx.English language

Meaning & usage

noun/ˈəʊbəʊ/Received-Pronunciation/ˈoʊboʊ/General-American/ˈoʊbɔɪ/obsolete
  1. 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.

Where this word comes from

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”).

FROM WORD TO NAME

Try it on your idea.

oboe has 4 characters. Say it out loud, try it alongside a description of your project, and see whether its meaning fits what you want to create.

oboe studiooboe workshello, oboe

These are naming prompts. Meanings and pronunciation can vary; existing brand and domain uses have not been checked.

Explore the name generator

A word with a source.

Definitions, grammatical labels, IPA, etymology and examples: Wiktionary contributors, extracted by Kaikki / Wiktextract. Adapted under CC BY-SA 4.0. Selected fields and authored examples are shown; third-party quotations and audio are omitted. See contributor history.

Last enriched 2026-09-10. Definitions are in English. Romanizations are shown when supplied by the source; syllable estimates are omitted for unsupported scripts.