Musical Instruments for Hangman 🎺

Clues for every answer

A one-line clue for every answer, easy to hard. They're the same clues the game's 💡 Hint shows, so you can read them out when you run your own game.

Drum

Percussion instrument: a skin stretched over a shell and struck, a design little changed for thousands of years.

Flute

Woodwind sounded by the player's breath flowing across an opening; Stone Age ones are the earliest known instruments.

Piano

Keyboard instrument whose keys make felt-coated hammers strike strings; comes in grand and upright types.

Harp

Stringed instrument, most often wooden and triangular, with strings at an angle to the soundboard, plucked by hand.

Banjo

Stringed instrument with a thin, typically circular membrane stretched over a frame; a mainstay of bluegrass music.

Cello

Medium-low pitched bowed string instrument of the violin family; modern ones rest on the floor on an endpin.

Violin

Wooden string instrument, sometimes called a fiddle, usually played with a bow; first made in 16th-century Italy.

Guitar

Fretted stringed instrument, typically with six or twelve strings, strummed or plucked; acoustic or electric.

Tuba

Large, deep brass instrument, usually with four or five valves; it plays the bass of an orchestra's brass section.

Organ

Keyboard instrument usually with manuals for the hands and a pedalboard for the feet; classic ones force air through pipes.

Bell

Struck percussion instrument, most often a hollow cup usually cast in bronze; its study is called campanology.

Bongo

Afro-Cuban pair of small hand drums of different sizes, joined by a wooden bridge and usually held between the legs.

Horn

Brass instrument of coiled tubing with a big flared bell facing backwards; a hand in the bell alters pitch.

Kazoo

An instrument you hum into rather than blow; a vibrating membrane gives your voice a buzzing sound.

Lute

Plucked string instrument with a neck and a deep round back enclosing a hollow body, usually with a sound hole.

Fife

Small, high-pitched instrument blown sideways like a piccolo, often heard in military units and marching bands.

Gong

Round metal percussion instrument, flat or bowl-shaped, usually struck with a mallet; it originated in Southeast Asia.

Lyre

Stringed instrument of ancient origin with two arms and a crossbar; those from Ur are thought the world's oldest surviving ones.

Pipe

General name for a tubular wind instrument; shepherds often played ones with six holes to soothe their sheep.

Bass

Largest, lowest-pitched string instrument normally found in the orchestra, also called the bull fiddle; bowed or plucked.

Trumpet

Brass instrument with tubing usually bent twice into a rounded rectangle; early forms signalled in battle or hunting.

Clarinet

Single-reed woodwind with a nearly cylindrical bore and a flared bell, developed around 1700 from the chalumeau.

Trombone

Brass instrument that nearly always changes pitch with a telescoping slide; its Italian name means 'large trumpet'.

Keyboard

Played with a row of levers pressed by the fingers; today often a synthesiser that can mimic many sounds.

Ukulele

Small four-stringed instrument of Portuguese origin, popularised in Hawaii; its name roughly means 'jumping flea'.

Bagpipes

Woodwind with reeds fed from a steady air supply held in a sack; Scotland's Great Highland kind is well known.

Saxophone

Single-reed woodwind with a conical, usually brass body, invented by a Belgian maker in the early 1840s.

Accordion

Box-shaped free-reed instrument worked by bellows: melody keys or buttons on the right, chord buttons on the left.

Tambourine

Percussion frame, most often round, with pairs of small metal jingles called zills; you shake, tap or hit it.

Recorder

Woodwind duct flute with a thumb-hole and seven finger holes; ones for school pupils are commonly moulded plastic.

Cymbals

Thin, normally round plates of copper alloy, often used in pairs; drum kits usually include a pair of hi-hats.

Mandolin

Lute-family instrument usually plucked with a pick; most often eight strings in pairs, tuned like a violin.

Maracas

Rattles shaken by a handle and usually played as a pair, heard in many kinds of Caribbean and Latin music.

Triangle

Metal bar bent into a three-cornered shape with one open end, hung from a loop and struck with a metal beater.

Bugle

Simple brass signalling instrument that normally has no valves, so it can play only its natural notes.

Cornet

Brass instrument like a trumpet but more compact and mellower, made by adding valves to the posthorn in the 1820s.

Piccolo

Smaller version of the concert flute that sounds an octave higher; its name is Italian for 'small'.

Timpani

Kettledrums: heads stretched over large bowls, traditionally copper; most modern ones are tuned with a foot pedal.

Harmonium

Reed organ usually set on the floor in a wooden case; a hand-pumped kind became central in Indian music.

Steel Drum

Tuned percussion made from 200-litre industrial barrels; the national instrument of Trinidad and Tobago.

Xylophone

Percussion instrument of tuned wooden bars struck with mallets; its Ancient Greek name means 'sound of wood'.

Harpsichord

Keyboard instrument whose keys make small quill or plastic plectrums pluck strings; big in Baroque music.

Glockenspiel

Percussion of tuned aluminium or steel bars in a keyboard layout, struck with mallets for a clear, high tone.

Didgeridoo

Wind instrument played with vibrating lips and circular breathing; developed by Aboriginal peoples of northern Australia.

Bassoon

Woodwind for tenor and lower notes, built in six pieces, usually of wood, and typically played seated with a strap.

Harmonica

Free-reed wind instrument, also called a mouth organ, played by breathing in or out through holes; big in blues.

Sousaphone

Tuba-family brass instrument wrapping round the player, its bell facing forward; named after an American bandleader.

Castanets

Pair of concave shells joined by a string and clicked in the hand; named after chestnuts, whose shell they resemble.

Theremin

Played without touching it: hands near two antennas set pitch and volume, giving an often eerie electronic sound.

Balalaika

Russian stringed instrument with a triangular, hollow wooden body, a fretted neck and three strings.

Euphonium

Tenor-voiced valved brass instrument, mostly in brass, military and concert bands; Greek name means 'sweet-voiced'.

Oboe

Double-reed woodwind, usually wooden, with a bright tone; it is known for giving the A that tunes the orchestra.

Contrabassoon

Very deep-sounding woodwind, an octave below its smaller cousin; twice as long, it curves round on itself twice.

Sitar

Plucked string instrument of Hindustani classical music, made famous abroad by Ravi Shankar; The Beatles used it.

Hurdy-gurdy

Strings sounded by a hand-cranked wheel rubbing against them; most have drones, giving a bagpipe-like sound.

Sackbut

Early form of the trombone from the Renaissance and Baroque, with a slide but a smaller bore and less-flared bell.

Ocarina

Vessel flute traditionally made of clay, typically with four to twelve finger holes; also called a 'potato flute'.

Celesta

Keyboard instrument whose hammers strike metal bars; famous from 'Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy' in The Nutcracker.

Zither

Stringed instrument with many strings across a thin, flat body and no separate neck, usually strummed or plucked.

Hammered Dulcimer

Strings stretched over a typically trapezoid soundboard, struck with a small spoon-shaped mallet held in each hand.