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Kaufmann’s 19th-century Trumpet Player automaton inspected in 1950
Word of the week: It sounds like a bulbous, multi-layered peeling vegetable, but this obscure mechanical musical instrument invented in 1812 in Dresden consisted of 24 trumpets and two kettle drums and, designed to mimic the sound of a marching band, might also make your eyes water
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A horse of the isabelline hue
Word of the week: Regularly found on the feathers of birds of the flanks of horses, this is a common, if subtle, pale greyish-yellow colour, thought to rather shadily take its name from Isabella Clara Eugenia, the daughter of King Philip II of Spain from the early 17th century with a shoddy story ending
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Bottles hanging on the wall …
Word of the week: It’s a colourful noun for an intoxicatingly visual subject, and in parallel relating to people who may be a labeorphilist or labeorphile, it refers to the enthusiasm for, and collection of beer bottle labels. But what’s the musical connection?
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A Mugwump in David Cronenberg’s film adaptation of William S. Burroughs’ novel The Naked Lunch
Word of the week: This oddly evocative noun might summon in the mind some tactile, earthy image, or a strange childrens’ TV fictional character, but actually pertains to a person who is politically neutral, aloof, or independent, and in 19th-century America, described anti-corruption party switchers
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Red-billed quelea
Word of the week: It’s the name of the genus of small African passerine birds, part of the weaver family Ploceidae, small, sparrow- or finch-like, they are highly gregarious, nomadic, chattering birds, with bills adapted to eating seeds, and the red-billed quelea is said to be the most numerous bird species in the world
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What stirs? A cup of withershins?
Word of the week: Also variously spelled widershins and widderschynnes, this Lowland Scots dialect word term derived from German means counter-clockwise, literally “against the way”, not only on a clock face, but originally against the perceived motion of the sun in the northern hemisphere
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Chateau Marmont Hotel, West Hollywood, California
Word of the week: It’s something in which many of us may indulge during the thick of winter, planning for holidays via booking websites, this noun meaning the study of hotels, extending also to researching their lore and history
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A row of aquabobs
Word of the week: Sounding like some water-based children’s TV superhero, it’s actually a particularly apt and descriptive word for wintertime, being an 18th-century English Kent dialect noun meaning icicle
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A gnomon is the part of a sundial that casts a shadow
Word of the week: From the Ancient Greek, γνώμων (gnṓmōn)this pointed noun literally means one that knows or examines, but it is specifically the part of a sundial that casts a shadow as well as referring to other mathematical terms
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Loweswater in the Cumbrian Lake District
Word of the week: A poetic word taken from the Latin lacus and French or Italan lacustre, this shimmering liquid of an adjective means relating to, formed in, living in, or growing in lakes, lake-like or positioned by a lake
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Illustration from Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel by Gustave Doré
Word of the week: Huge, gigantic, enormous, voracious or insatiable, this colourful adjective derives from the character in the pioneering 16th-century French prose writer François Rabelais’s multiple volume work, Gargantua and Pantagruel
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Meadowlark at first light
Word of the week: An evocative, poetic French word adopted into English language in the 17th century meaning a song or poem set, or performed, at dawn or evoking daybreak, most often about lovers separating – and the flipside of a serenade
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A selection of daxophone tongues
Word of the week: A uniquely versatile friction idiophone instrument that produces sound through the vibration of wooden slats played by finger touch and bow, producing an extraordinary range of animal and vocal-style noises, its name derived from the German word Dachs, meaning badger
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Romanian nai virtuoso Gheorghe Zamfir
Word of the week: This Romanian 17th-century panpipe is a mainstay of traditional folk and classical music, wide in range and resonant, it is made up of at least 20 pipes made of bamboo or reed in the diatonic scale of C or G, and emits a clean, distinctive sound
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Dance craze: depiction of the first quadrille in England at Almack’s in 1816
Word of the week: A sprightly, sociable18th- and 19th-century dance form that sprung from folk contredanses, it comprises four couples in rectangular formation and was all the range in polite society in the Victorian age in Europe and colonies, and is linked to American square dancing
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A terpidion’s interior workings with rolling cylinder and leather-covered hammers create sound via friction
Word of the week: The terpodion, also known as uranion, is an extremely rare 19th-century keyboard instrument that, when keys are pressed, creates sound via friction against a rotating coated wooden cylinder
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An eight-string huapanguera with three pairs of doubled up notes
Word of the week: This guitar variant eight-stringed instrument of the Huasteca region of Mexico offers a deeper sound than its more conventional acoustic cousin, often played within a conjunto huasteco ensemble, alongside a five-string jarana huasteca and violin
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The ikh khuur (centre)
Word of the week: This distinctive looking trapezoid-shaped sound box instrument is the two- or three-stringed Mongolian bowed double bass, complete with a ornately carved horse head neck, and related to the better known fiddle equivalent and Mongolia’s national instrument, the morin huur
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Persian kamanchehs dated around 1880
Word of the week: Most commonly tuned like the violin (G, D, A, E) though with variants, though with its own distinct sound this Persian bowed string instrument used in Persian, Azerbaijani, Armenian, and Kurdish music, has a long neck and a spherical body
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Just three cornettos … the largest of which is the curvy s-shaped lysarden, also known as the lizard or tenor model
Word of the week: One of several words for the Renaissance and Baroque period tenor cornett or cornetto, also known as the lizard, lyzard, lizarden, or lyzarden due to its s-curved shape, it has a distinctive horn-like foggy sound and is frequently played in ensemble alongside trombones
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