Banjo

How to spell banjo

5 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce banjo

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does banjo mean?

1. nounA stringed musical instrument with a circular body, a long neck, and a drum-like membrane stretched over a frame, played by plucking or strumming.

Banjo in a sentence

• He tuned the banjo before the bluegrass set began.

• A battered banjo hung on the wall of the music shop.

Where does banjo come from?

Language of origin: Other

Banjo is an American word that first appears in print in the 1700s, though its deeper origins are genuinely uncertain and debated. The leading view traces it to a word carried across the Atlantic by enslaved West Africans, often linked to the Kimbundu term mbanza, the name of a gourd-bodied stringed instrument; early colonial spellings such as banza, banjar, and banjer support this African source. A competing theory holds that it is simply a dialectal English mangling of bandore (also spelled bandora), the name of a deep-toned Renaissance lute that descends ultimately from the Greek pandoura, an ancient three-stringed instrument. The truth may blend both: an African instrument and name reshaped by English ears already familiar with bandore. The modern spelling settled with the tidy -jo ending, which is why the trap today is simply remembering the single j rather than a g.

How the word is built

• banjo (single indivisible root; not built from prefix, root, and suffix, probably an English reshaping of a West African word for a stringed instrument)