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A flautist, flutist, or flute player is a musician who plays the flute
Flute

The flute is a musical instrument of the woodwind family. Unlike other woodwind instruments, a flute is a reedless wind instrument that produces its sound from the flow of air against an edge....
.

choice of "flautist" (from the Italian
Italian language

Italian is a Romance languages spoken by about 63 million people as a first language, primarily in Italy. In Switzerland, Italian is one of four Linguistic geography of Switzerlands....
 flautista, from flauto, and adopted due to eighteenth century Italian influence
List of English words of Italian origin

Many words of Italian origin have entered other languages. A large part of musical terminology is Italian, as are popular foods from Italian cuisine....
) versus "flutist" is the source of minor dispute among players of the instrument.






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A flautist, flutist, or flute player is a musician who plays the flute
Flute

The flute is a musical instrument of the woodwind family. Unlike other woodwind instruments, a flute is a reedless wind instrument that produces its sound from the flow of air against an edge....
.

Naming controversy

Flute Player
The choice of "flautist" (from the Italian
Italian language

Italian is a Romance languages spoken by about 63 million people as a first language, primarily in Italy. In Switzerland, Italian is one of four Linguistic geography of Switzerlands....
 flautista, from flauto, and adopted due to eighteenth century Italian influence
List of English words of Italian origin

Many words of Italian origin have entered other languages. A large part of musical terminology is Italian, as are popular foods from Italian cuisine....
) versus "flutist" is the source of minor dispute among players of the instrument. "Flutist" is the earlier term in the English language, dating from at least 1603 (the earliest quote cited by the Oxford English Dictionary
Oxford English Dictionary

The Oxford English Dictionary , published by the Oxford University Press , is a comprehensive dictionary of the English language. Two fully-bound print editions of the OED have been published under its current name, in 1928 and 1989; as of December 2008 the dictionary's current editors have completed a quarter of the third edition....
), while "flautist" is not recorded before 1860, when it was used by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Nathaniel Hawthorne

Nathaniel Hawthorne was an American novelist and short story writer.Nathaniel Hathorne was born in 1804 in the city of Salem, Massachusetts to Nathaniel Hathorne and Elizabeth Clarke Manning Hathorne....
 in The Marble Faun
The Marble Faun

The Marble Faun was the last of the four major romances by Nathaniel Hawthorne. After writing The Blithedale Romance in 1852, Hawthorne, approaching fifty, turned away from publication and obtained a political appointment as American Consul in Liverpool, England, an appointment which he held from 1853 to 1857....
. While the print version of the OED does not indicate any regional preference for either form, the online Compact OED characterizes "flutist" as an American usage.

Richard Rockstro in his three volume treatise The Flute written in England in 1890 uses "flute-player."

The American player and writer Nancy Toff, in her The Flute Book, devotes more than a page to the subject, commenting that she is asked "Are you a flutist or a flautist?" on a weekly basis. She prefers "flutist": "Ascribe my insistence either to a modest lack of pretension or to etymological evidence; the result is the same." Toff, who is also an editor for Oxford University Press , describes in some detail the etymology of words for "flute," comparing OED, Fowler's Dictionary of Modern Usage, Evans' Dictionary of Contemporary American Usage, and Copperud's American Usage and Style: The Consensus before arriving at her conclusion.

The first edition of the OED lists fluter as dating from circa 1400 and Fowler's Modern English Usage states that "there seems no good reason" why flautist should have prevailed over fluter or flutist. However, according to Webster's Dictionary of English Usage, flautist is the preferred term in British English, and while both terms are used in American English flutist is "by far the more common choice."

James Galway
James Galway

Sir James Galway Order of the British Empire is a Northern Ireland–born virtuoso flautist from Belfast, nicknamed "The Man With the Golden Flute"....
 summed up the way he feels about "flautist," saying, "I am a flute player not a flautist. I don't have a flaut and I've never flauted."

Notable people who play the flute (flute players)


Manet, Edouard Young Flautist, Or the Fifer, 1866 (2)

Notable jazz flute players


Notable progressive rock
Progressive rock

Progressive rock is a form of rock music that evolved in the late 1960s and early 1970s as part of a "mostly British attempt to elevate rock music to new levels of artistic credibility." The term "art rock" is often used interchangeably with "progressive rock", but while there are crossovers between the two genres, they are not identical....
 players include


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