noun
- Also called mouth organ. a musical wind instrument consisting of a small rectangular case containing a set of metal reeds connected to a row of holes, over which the player places the mouth and exhales and inhales to produce the tones.
- any of various percussion instruments that use graduated bars of metal or other hard material as sounding elements.
noun
- Also called: mouth organ a small wind instrument of the reed organ family in which reeds of graduated lengths set into a metal plate enclosed in a narrow oblong box are made to vibrate by blowing and sucking
- See glass harmonica
1762, coined by Ben Franklin as the name for a glass harmonica, from Latin fem. of harmonicus (see harmonic); modern sense of “mouth organ” is 1873, American English, earlier harmonicon (1825).