hand organ
- noun
- /hænd ˈɔrɡən/
- Archaic
:
órgano de manivela
- During the festival, a performer showcased his skills on the hand organ, attracting a large audience.
Examples
-
She brought her hand organ to the picnic, delighting everyone with its charming tunes.
-
and a fellow from Hungary with a hand organ and a monkey and a tinker twice a year and a picture-taker, a good many picture-takers, who took your picture with a camera as big as a beehive and went right to work in their wagons and printed it and finished your picture then and there.
Fiction book (1999) -
The street musician played cheerful melodies on his hand organ as children gathered around to listen.
Synonyms
A small music machine you turn by hand to play tunes from a cylinder with pegs
A machine that makes music when you turn a handle
How Loud
Surface Forms
Morphology
The noun compound 'hand organ' is directly interpretable as a type of organ that is operated by hand: 'hand' signals manual operation or small size and 'organ' signals a musical instrument. A B1 learner who knows both constituents can therefore infer a small, manually operated musical instrument (even if they may not predict the precise crank-and-cylinder mechanism), so the meaning is compositionally transparent.
Etymology
The noun hand organ comes from a simple image: an organ played by the hand turning a handle. Old instruments used a turning drum with pins to make the music, so the name means 'a small, portable instrument you play by turning a handle'.