Post Description

The words "lute" and "oud" derive from Arabic al'ud (?????; literally "the wood").[1] Recent research by Eckhard Neubauer suggests 'ud may in turn be an Arabized version of the Persian name rud, which meant "string", "stringed instrument", or "lute".[2] It has equally been suggested the "wood" in the name may have distinguished the instrument by its wooden soundboard from skin-faced predecessors.[3] Gianfranco Lotti suggests the "wood" appellation originally carried derogatory connotations because of proscriptions of all instrumental music in early Islam.
 
Construction
 
Soundboard
 
Lutes are made almost entirely of wood. The soundboard is a teardrop-shaped thin flat plate of resonant wood (typically spruce). In all lutes the soundboard has a single (sometimes triple) decorated sound hole under the strings called the rose. The sound hole is not open, but rather covered with a grille in the form of an intertwining vine or a decorative knot, carved directly out of the wood of the soundboard.