Chordophone consisting of a plucked instrument having a pear-shaped body, a usually bent neck, and a fretted fingerboard

Usage examples of lute.

Griffeides, Orpheus with his lute of eight blue stars, Miraldra the Enchantress with blazing Fenim for her diadem, and low in the southeast the star-veils of Alastor Cluster.

I brought my lute so that I could accompany myself while I tell you my bathetic story.

Then to an accompaniment of lutes and theorbos and citherns moving above the pulse of muffled drums, a choir of maidens sang a song of welcome, strewing the path before the lords of Demonland and the Queen with sweet white hyacinths and narcissus blooms, while the ladies Mevrian and Armelline, more lovely than any queens of earth, waited at the head of the golden staircase above the inner court to greet Queen Sophonisba come to Galing.

Is it so hard being mistress of a grand castle that you covet a life in the wildwood with only your lute and gittern and pipes to sustain you?

This time the performance of the minstrels had been more boisterous than before, with tambourines and drums in lieu of gittern and lute.

He had grown tired of fighting with the lutenist all the time, of working so hard to accommodate a man whose lute playing was so undisciplined and whose skill with a blade remained so uncertain.

Mattheson, who wrote in the latter part of the eighteenth century, when the lute was still cultivated, said that a lutist of eighty years must have spent nearly sixty in tuning his instrument.

As he finished, he heard a familiar light tread coming up the stairs and turned to see Lys, with her lute in its leather case slung over her shoulder.

The Tourney Field was filled with harmonies played on sackbut and serpent, on ophicleide, gittern, and lute.

Not answering at once, Payn picked up a lute and lazily began plucking a tune.

During each display highly formal music was plucked from a lute by a gentleman from a clan different to that of the Phane owner.

The lute, the trombone, the pommer and the triangle were new acquisitions.

This was the best song the Fox had ever sung, from the Third and Last Booke of lute songs of John Dowland who had lived at the time of Shakespeare and whose music the Fox had remastered for the world of today.

Blade cursed him and swore he had missed his calling-instead of a mangy cutpurse he should have been a lying skald, setting his wild tales to music on a lute.

Is varied, one chime rings through all: One chime -- though I sing more or sing less, I have but one string to my lute, And it might have been better if, stringless And songless, the same had been mute.