Violin

How to spell violin

6 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce violin

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does violin mean?

1. nounA small, high-pitched bowed string instrument held under the chin and played with a bow.

Violin in a sentence

• She tuned her violin before the orchestra rehearsal began.

• The music shop repaired the cracked body of his antique violin.

Where does violin come from?

Language of origin: Italian

The word arrived in English in the late 1500s from the Italian violino, a diminutive of viola, the name of an older family of bowed string instruments. The '-ino' ending literally meant 'little', so a violino was effectively a 'little viola', the smaller, higher-pitched member of the group. The Italian viola itself traces back to the medieval Latin vitula, thought to be linked to Vitula, a Roman goddess of joy and celebration, and to the verb vitulari, meaning 'to rejoice' or 'to make merry'. That same root branched into other instrument names, including the fiddle, which shares the deep ancestry even though it travelled through Germanic rather than Italian. The English spelling keeps the Italian shape closely, which is why the word ends in '-lin' rather than a softer phonetic form.

How the word is built

• viol (the older bowed string instrument)
• -in (Italian diminutive '-ino', meaning 'little')