Topic summary
Flautist
Extracted from the Wikipedia article Flute.
Etymology and terminology
A musician who plays any instrument in the flute family can be called a flutist, flautist, or flute player. Flutist dates back to at least 1603, the earliest quotation cited by the Oxford English Dictionary. Flautist was used in 1860 by Nathaniel Hawthorne in The Marble Faun, after being adopted during the 18th century from Italy (flautista, itself from flauto), like many musical terms in England since the Italian Renaissance. Other English terms, now virtually obsolete, are fluter (15th–19th centuries) and flutenist (17th and 18th centuries).