bowed stringed instrument
- noun
:
instrumento de cuerda frotado
- During the performance, the musician skillfully played the bowed stringed instrument with great passion.
Examples
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How does the sound of a bowed string instrument, such as the violin, differ from a plucked string instrument, such as the guitar?
Academic text (2011) -
The bowed stringed instrument produced a rich, melodic sound that filled the concert hall.
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In classical music, a bowed stringed instrument like the cello adds depth to the orchestra's harmony.
Surface Forms
Morphology
bowed + stringed + instrument
The meaning is directly and transparently derived from combining 'bowed' (played with a bow), 'stringed' (having strings) and 'instrument' (a musical device); together they compose the literal description 'an instrument with strings that is played with a bow'. This adjectival–noun compounding follows common compositional patterns and is cross-linguistically predictable, so a B1 learner who knows the constituents would infer the meaning.
Etymology
Bowed stringed instrument comes from the simple image of a stringed instrument that is played with a bow. The word bowed shows you use a stick with horsehair and pull it across the strings of the stringed instrument to make sound, so the phrase means an instrument 'played with a bow'.
