cuatro

American  

[kwot-roh] / ˈkwɒt roʊ /

Or quatro

noun

• cuatros
  plural

1. a small guitar with four or five strings or pairs of strings, used in Latin American and Caribbean music.

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Other Word Forms

Noun Inflected Forms

• cuatros
  plural

Etymology

Origin of cuatro

First recorded in 1900–05; from Latin American Spanish, Spanish: literally, “four”; see origin at four ( def. )

Example Sentences

See Examples For:

cuatro cuatros

She learned how to play the cuatro from her father, whose family took refuge in Venezuela during the Spanish Civil War.

From Los Angeles Times ● Apr. 11, 2025

His parents built this rustic farmhouse, with its long wood-burning stove, antlers used as hat hooks and mango tree where the cowboys sat playing a ukulele-like instrument called a cuatro.

From New York Times ● Jan. 16, 2024

One winner was Estrada, who plays pensive, largely acoustic songs using a guitar-like Venezuelan cuatro.

From New York Times ● Nov. 18, 2022

Although Estrada plays a multitude of instruments, she’s most fond of her Venezuelan cuatro, a compact, four-string descendant of the Spanish Renaissance-era guitar.

From Los Angeles Times ● Feb. 11, 2022

A group of men showed up with a cuatro, a guitar, maracas, and güiros.

From "When I Was Puerto Rican" by Esmeralda Santiago

I The King Page 202 1 Veinte e cuatros, literally “twenty-fours,” aldermen or regidors in the town councils of certain towns in Andalusia.

From The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 — Volume 09 of 55 1593-1597 Explorations by Early Navigators, Descriptions of the Islands and Their Peoples, Their History and Records of the Catholic Missions, as Related in Contemporaneous Books and Manuscripts, Showing the Political, Economic, Commercial and Religious Conditions of Those Islands from Their Earliest Relations with European Nations to the Close of the Nineteenth Century by James Alexander Robertson