Guitar

How to spell guitar

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce guitar

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does guitar mean?

1. nounA stringed musical instrument, usually with six strings, played by plucking or strumming.

Guitar in a sentence

• He learned to play the guitar in his teens.

• The music shop had a row of acoustic guitar models on the wall.

Where does guitar come from?

Language of origin: Spanish

The word arrived in English in the 1600s from the Spanish guitarra, the name of a six-stringed plucked instrument that had become hugely popular across the Iberian peninsula. Spanish in turn took the word from Arabic qitara, which speakers of Arabic had borrowed from the ancient Greek kithara, the name of a large lyre-like instrument played in classical times. The Greek kithara is also the distant ancestor of the modern word 'zither', so two very different instruments share one root. Along the way the spelling collected its silent-looking 'u' after the 'g', which keeps the 'g' hard and which is exactly the letter adults tend to forget. English settled on the single-r 'guitar' rather than the Spanish double-r guitarra, trimming the word as it was absorbed.

How the word is built

• guitar (from Spanish guitarra, a stringed instrument); no internal prefix or suffix in modern English