Pandean pipes
Americanplural noun
Etymology
Origin of Pandean pipes
First recorded in 1810–20
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
Johann Christian Bach composed songs for Vauxhall every season for fifteen years, though even he must have felt upstaged by an Italian gentleman called Rivolta whose novelty act at the Gardens involved his playing eight musical instruments simultaneously: pandean pipes, tabor, Spanish guitar, triangle, harmonica, Chinese crescent, cymbals and bass drum.
From Literature
![]()
Players and riders,—men and women,—clothed in gay raiments, rendered brilliant with spangles, paced backwards and forwards along their platforms to the sound of drums, organs, and Pandean pipes, cymbals, tambourines, and castanets.
From Project Gutenberg
Always, while he was preparing some new trick, a man kept playing on the Pandean pipes, and beating a drum at the same time.
From Project Gutenberg
It was none of your grand new instruments, full of stops bearing a score of unaccountable names, miserably naked, skeleton-looking affairs, like a conglomeration of Pandean pipes grown out of knowledge, and too big for the society of their old friend the big drum—beggarly painted things, with pipes in blue and red and white, after the fashion of peppermint sticks of the good old times.
From Project Gutenberg
This was done in ancient as it is in modern times, by playing the Pandean pipes.
From Project Gutenberg
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.