violin bow
1
4.0
- noun
- /vaɪəˈlɪn boʊ/
:
arco de violín
- The musician tightened the horsehair on her violin bow to improve the sound.
Examples
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She carefully placed her violin bow on the stand when she finished playing.
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How many times do I have to tell you my violin bow is not a chew toy?
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It's a violin bow.
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And with a dozen violin bows moving in perfect synchrony, the orchestra looks as good as it sounds.
Academic text (1995) -
So in one swipe of a violin bow, the strings will undergo hundreds of these cycles of sticking and slipping.
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The violin bow, he thought, is just a horse tail, rubbed in resin, a fir secretion.
Fiction book (1995) -
After practicing for hours, he finally mastered using the violin bow correctly.
Synonyms
28
5.6
A curved stick with tight hairs used to play string instruments like the violin
2
9.0
A long stick with horsehair used to play a violin
How Professional
Surface Forms
Morphology
The noun combines two concrete, literal constituents: 'violin' (the instrument) and 'bow' (the stick with horsehair). This straightforward compound denotes the bow used for a violin and follows a common cross-linguistic pattern of instrument+tool, so a B1 learner who knows both words will readily infer the meaning.
Etymology
Violin bow gets its name from the curved stick called a bow. The tool looks like an arrow bow and is moved across the strings to 'make sound', so the name came to mean the stick used to play the violin.