Today’s Shakespearean word of the day is… hautboy
Pronounced hoh-boy, a hautboy is a wind instrument, later called an oboe.
Hautboys are usually sounded when someone important is coming on stage or something important is about to happen. In Macbeth a scene opens with the stage direction ‘Hautboys and torchers. Enter King Duncan’ (Macbeth, 1.6.1).
Listen to the pronunciation of hautboy here
This definition is taken from the Oxford Illustrated Shakespeare Dictionary, a unique dictionary to unlock the mysteries of Shakespeare’s world, words and language, compiled by renowned English language expert David Crystal and Shakespearean actor and producer Ben Crystal.