Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- n. A woodwind instrument with a single-reed mouthpiece and a usually curved conical metal tube, including soprano, alto, tenor, and baritone sizes.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- n. A musical instrument, properly of the clarinet class, but with a metal tube like a trumpet or horn, invented by Adolphe Sax about 1840. It consists of a clarinet mouthpiece or beak and a conical tube more or less convoluted, with about twenty flngerholes controlled by keys or levers. Eight sizes or varieties are made, which are named from their fundamental key or their relative compass. They are especially useful in military bands as a more sonorous substitute for clarinets, but are almost unused in the orchestra.
Wiktionary
- n. music A single-reed instrument musical instrument of the woodwind family, usually made of brass and with a distinctive loop bringing the bell upwards
GNU Webster's 1913
- n. (Mus.) A wind instrument of brass, containing a reed, and partaking of the qualities both of a brass instrument and of a clarinet.
WordNet 3.0
- n. a single-reed woodwind with a conical bore
Etymologies
- Borrowing from French saxophone, a combination of the surname of its inventor Adolphe Sax (1814–1894) + -o- + -phone ("phone"), from Ancient Greek φωνή (fōnḗ, "voice") (Wiktionary)
- After Sax, surname of 19th-century Belgian instrument-making family. (American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition)
Examples
“THE SIMPSONS NETWORK: Can you imagine a television network where Sideshow Bob is beating himself up with rakes or Bleeding Gums Murphy is powerhousing his saxophone from the heavens at any given moment in the day?”
“When he plays free-form style, as on "Late Works," his new duet album with guitarist Fred Frith, it's the most extreme avant-garde music you'll hear, combining the furthest-out acoustic screeches and shrieks that an alto saxophone is capable of making with the distortion and random noise that only a guitar-based electronics kit can produce.”
“The saxophone is Jazzamoart's fetish, the instrument that appears most often in his work.”
“If you ask any parent of a beginning band member what instrument their child plays, they will say "the saxophone," or just "saxophone" -- not "a saxophone.”
“The vicar would never let our saxophonists bring their instruments into the church; he claimed the saxophone was the devil's instrument and represented the serpent in the Garden of Eden.”
“MR: You've even said that you think that the saxophone is an extension of your soul, is that right?”
The Huffington Post: Mike Ragogna: A World Of Sound: Chatting & Improvising With David S. Ware
“Although West Coast musicians with Mr. Collette's skills commonly moved to New York in search of wider visibility, Collette chose to remain in Los Angeles, where he worked for more than four decades as a first-call saxophone and woodwind specialist.”
The Washington Post: Buddy Collette, Grammy-nominated saxophonist, dies at 89
“You had said that there's a great story behind how Kadri Gopalnath started playing saxophone, which is an unusual instrument for classical Indian music.”
“The Indian social theorist Ashis Nandy writes of the two voices in Kipling, which have been called the saxophone and the oboe.”
“The saxophone is a naturally raucous instrument; it fits into rock and roll as easily as bebop.”
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘saxophone’.
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MUSIC - jazz
funky, pedal, bebop, rap, mix, sub, mid, rag, ECM, bpm, bop, Afro and 437 more...
-
phono-, phon-, -phony
relating to sound
phonograph, phonics, phonology, telephony, phoneme, phone, telephone, phonautograph, phonetic, phonebook, phonography, phonolite and 107 more...
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MUSIC - ALL TERMS
With focus on non-classical styles, but not excluding terms of the latter.
banjo, accompaniment, acoustic bass, bass guitar, bass clef, ground, brass, cornet, Mute, alto saxophone, baritone saxophone, arrangement and 866 more...
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Phones, But Not Telephones!
These are musical instruments or mythological figures instead!
saxophone, heckelphone, sarrusophone, mellophone, sousaphone, lamellophone, metallophone, xylophone, vibraphone, crystallophone, pyrophone, idiophone and 53 more...
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Cellophane and other household instru...
Well, inspired by the word 'cellophane', there must be basis for a list containing words for other arcane instruments found in the household
saxophone, clarinet, champagne flute, frying panpipes, drinking double horn, can can opener, singing bowl, milkshaker, glass harmonica, kazoorole, kettledrums, timpanino and 19 more...
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WF - Words from Proper Names
bowdlerize, boycott, caesarean, lynch, pasteurize, sadist, sandwich, hoover, braille, wellington, cardigan, macintosh and 11 more...
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Just 'cause I like 'em, S
scrunch, solace, sabotage, saccade, sacerdotal, sacrilegious, sacristy, snappy, skew, steadfast, scowl, scorch and 781 more...
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The Sog Collection
My big word list.
chaos, flaccid, empirical, flotsam, cacophony, grumble, assuage, awe, romance, mortality, coalesce, fortuitous and 3282 more...
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Musical Eponyms
list suggested by @grrillaesthete
Frippertronics, Moog, theremin, saxophone, sarrusophone, sousaphone, heckelphone
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S
saffron, sapphire, sashay, satin, seashell, seductive, sepia, serene, shadow, shimmer, silhouette, skyline and 96 more...
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WrightHandWords's Words
yclept, unction, prana, satya, abhyasa, vairagya, yoga, ashtanga, acronym, etymology, asana, widget and 286 more...
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-phone
denoting a sound instrument; denoting a speaker of a specific language
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Eponyms Spelling Bee List
need to learn these words!!!!!!!!!!!
praline, hosta, salmonella, tortoni, gardenia, zinnia, samaritan, jeremiad, shrapnel, boswell, Fletcherism, bandersnatch and 41 more...
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I Don't Like It
indefatigable, saxophone, cacophany, bombastic, behoove, lackadaisical, sycophant, maudlin, tar baby, smegma, brassy, taciturn and 2 more...
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music
octave, lyric, opera, flute, maracas, gong, tambourine, bass, trumpet, balalaika, lyre, bongos and 36 more...
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Cool Words
pensive, understand, firefly, word, man-whore, queer, schwul, borough, dude, zeitgeist, doppelganger, horticulture and 12 more...
Tweets
Looking for tweets for saxophone.
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