Saxophone

How to spell saxophone

9 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce saxophone

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does saxophone mean?

1. nounA single-reed wind instrument made of brass, common in jazz and concert bands.

Saxophone in a sentence

• He practised the saxophone for an hour before the gig.

• The jazz quartet featured a saxophone alongside the piano.

Where does saxophone come from?

Language of origin: Other

This word is one of the rare everyday terms built on a real person's name. It honours Adolphe Sax, a Belgian instrument maker who patented his new family of single-reed brass instruments in Paris in the 1840s. To his surname he attached the Greek element phone, meaning 'sound' or 'voice', the same piece that ends 'telephone' and 'microphone'. So the literal sense is roughly 'Sax's sound-maker', and English adopted the term in the 1840s and 1850s as the instrument spread through military bands and later jazz. The spelling trap lives in that hidden -o- joining vowel and the -phone ending, which sounds like 'fone' but keeps its Greek ph; remembering the Greek phone relatives is the easiest way to lock in the correct letters.

How the word is built

• sax- (from Adolphe Sax, the inventor's surname)
• -o- (connecting vowel)
• -phone (from Greek phone: sound, voice)