FIDDLE, a popular term for the violin, derived from the names of certain of its ancestors. The word has first been traced in 1205 in Layamon's Brut (7002), "of harpe, of salteriun, of fithele and of coriun." In Chaucer's time the fiddle was evidently a well-known instrument : For him was lever [i.e., befell have at his beddes hed A twenty bokes, clothed in black or red, Of Aristotle and his Philosophie, Than robes riche or fidel or sautrie.
(Prologue, v. 298.) The remote common ancestor of the fiddle is the ketharah of the Assyrians, the parent of the Greek cithara. The Romans are re sponsible for the word fiddle, having bestowed upon a kind of cithara—probably then in its first transition—the name of fidiculae (more rarely fidicula), a diminutive form of fides.
For the descent of the guitar-fiddle, the first bowed ancestor of the violin, through many transitions from the cithara, see CITH