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saxophone

nounverbattested in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//ˈsæksəˌfəʊ̯n//
  • United States//ˈsæksəˌfoʊ̯n//

A single-reed instrument musical instrument of the woodwind family, usually made of brass and with a distinctive loop bringing the bell upwards.

noun

  1. 1

    A single-reed instrument musical instrument of the woodwind family, usually made of brass and with a distinctive loop bringing the bell upwards.

    I played the saxophone in high school.

  2. 2

    Someone who plays the saxophone; a saxophonist.

    The saxophones typically sit behind the flutes in a concert band.

Etymology

Borrowed from French saxophone, a combination of the surname of its inventor Adolphe Sax (1814–1894) + -o- + -phone (“something that makes a sound”), from Ancient Greek φωνή (phōnḗ, “sound, voice”). The first element surname is a variant of the German Sachs (“Saxon”). Analyzable as Sax + -o- + -phone.

verb

  1. 1

    To play the saxophone.

Forms

plural
saxophones
past tense
saxophoned
past participle
saxophoned
present participle
saxophoning
third person singular
saxophones
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).