Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- n. A small hexagonal accordion with bellows and with buttons for keys.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- n. A musical instrument invented by Professor Wheatstone, the principle of which is similar to that of the accordion. It is composed of a bellows, with two faces or ends, generally polygonal in shape, on which are placed the various stops or studs, by the action of which air is admitted to the free metallic reeds that produce the sounds.
Wiktionary
- n. A musical instrument, like the various accordions, that is a member of the free-reed family of musical instruments, typically having buttons on both ends.
- n. Something resembling a concertina, such as a folded book or a bus door.
- n. Coiled barbed wire for use as an obstacle.Webster's New Dictionary And Thesaurus, Geddes & Grosset Ltd, New Lanark, Scotland 1990
- v. to become compressed into a shape reminiscent of a concertina
GNU Webster's 1913
- n. A small musical instrument on the principle of the accordion. It is a small elastic box, or bellows, having free reeds on the inside, and keys and handles on the outside of each of the two hexagonal heads.
WordNet 3.0
- n. coiled barbed wire used as an obstacle
- n. free-reed instrument played like an accordion by pushing its ends together to force air through the reeds
- v. collapse like a concertina
Etymologies
- concert + Italian -ina, feminine diminutive suff.
Examples
“I'd like to see these communists tarred, feathered, roped in concertina, and dunped just south of the US international border.”
“The sight of this, Alda declared, made her ill; though the little boy was as docile as he was helpless; but it was quite true that to nerves and ears not inured from the first, Theodore's humming and his concertina were a trial from their perpetuity.”
“The concertina, which is somewhat like an accordion but smaller and with buttons but no keys, has a well-deserved reputation for being hard to learn.”
“The humidifier needs a replaceable 'wick' - a kind of concertina-like filter.”
“There is a minimum range which if the hoard was able to reach would require the artillery be either moved or abandoned, but the numbers destroyed up to that point would be huge Also, though a theoretical zombie hoard would be able to overcome conventional countermobility measures such as concertina wire or barbed wire entanglements by simply climbing over the zombies entangled in the obstacle, arranging such defenses in depth would deplete the horde as more and more of the zombies became part of the landscape.”
“Kind of like building high walls, installing concertina wire and setting an alarm when I go to bed.”
“We, therefore, put up some concertina wire atop our surrounding stone walls and, so far, have had no additional problems since.”
“We also built a new interior wall defining a carport and ensuring us privacy and increased the exterior wall size from four feet to eight feet and installed concertina wire on top of that plus an elaborate motion-detector, fully monitored alarm system to thwart burglars.”
“It was wonderful and my first time hearing a concertina at a real concert.”
“He directed from the harpsichord for all the concert – except the bit he directed from the concertina, sitting at the harpsichord.”
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘concertina’.
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Accordions, et al
Words or phrases associated with the accordion and its family—free reed aerophones. And, please, wisecracks.
bellows, squeeze, aerophone, bayan, concertina, squeeze box, stomach steinway, windjammer, ship's piano, belly organ, pleated piano, waistline wurlitzer and 25 more...
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