clarin

Meanings

1. 1
   noun

   historical: a very long, trumpetlike wind instrument of Indigenous Mexico; the acocotl type is sounded by drawing air inward through its mouthpiece

   The museum displayed a clarin made from a long, gently curved plant stalk.

Borrowed from Spanish clarín, 'trumpet,' probably a modification of French clairon or claron. Spanish speakers applied the name clarín to the Mexican acocotl, a long plant-stalk trumpet whose unusual inward-drawn playing technique is described in nineteenth-century accounts and in The Picture of Dorian Gray.

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