spinet
pronunciation
How to pronounce spinet in British English:
UK [spɪˈnet]
How to pronounce spinet in American English:
US [ˈspɪnət]
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- Noun:
- small and compactly built upright piano
- early model harpsichord with only one string per note
Word Origin
- spinet
- spinet: [17] A spinet is a sort of small harpsichord. English acquired the term via early modern French espinette from Italian spinetta, and one version of its origin is that it came from the name of one Giovanni Spinetti, a Venetian who supposedly invented the instrument at the beginning of the 16th century. A more prosaic story is that it was a diminutive form of spina ‘thorn’ (a relative of English spine), the allusion being to the plucking of the strings with thornlike quills.
- spinet (n.)
- 1660s, spinette, "small harpsichord," from Middle French espinette (16c., Modern French épinette), from Italian spinetta, said by Scaliger to be a diminutive of spina "thorn, spine," from Latin spina "thorn" (see spine), so called because the strings were plucked with thorn-like quills [Barnhart]. The other theory (favored by Klein and assigned "greater probability" by OED) dates to early 17c. and claims the word is from the name of the Venetian inventor, Giovanni Spinetti (fl. c. 1503). As "small, upright piano" from 1936.
Example
- 1. But the spinet was too big for me to play .
- 2. The ancestry of the piano can be traced to the early keyboard instruments of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries -- the spinet , the dulcimer , and the virginal .