Hearpe

Part of speech: noun, verb

Definitions

1. An archaic spelling of the harp, a triangular stringed instrument played by plucking its strings with the fingers
2. An Old English form of the word for a plucked stringed instrument with strings stretched across an open frame
3. A medieval spelling denoting the harp, the stringed musical instrument whose strings are plucked to produce notes

Etymology: "Hearpe" is the Middle English spelling of "harp," a word that goes back to Old English "hearpe," recorded in texts from before the year 1000 and related to the harp in Germanic languages such as Old Norse "harpa" and Old High German "harpha." The instrument itself is far older than its name, and the word's ancestry in the Germanic family points to a shared stock of terms for a stringed instrument plucked by hand, rather than to any Latin or Greek source. The most striking feature of the word is how little it has changed in its essentials across more than a thousand years. Old English "hearpe" was pronounced with a strong initial "h" and a vowel that later shifted during the Great Vowel Shift, so the Middle English "hearpe" you are asking about was a stage between these two forms, spelled with the diphthong "ea" that English scribes used for a long open vowel. Chaucer and his contemporaries would have written it this way, and the modern spelling "harp" simply dropped the final "e" that had stopped being pronounced.

Synonyms: lyre