The oud (/uːd/; Arabic: عود ʿūd Arabic pronunciation: [ʕu(ː)d, ʢuːd], plural: أعواد aʿwād; Armenian: ուդ, Syriac: ܥܘܕ ūd, Greek: ούτι oúti; Hebrew: עוּד ud; Persian: بربط barbat; Kurdish: ûd; Turkish: ud or ut;Azeri: ud; Somali: cuud or kaban) is a pear-shaped stringed instrument commonly used in Persian, Arabic, Greek, Turkish, Jewish, Byzantine, Azerbaijani, Armenian, North African (Chaabi, Classical, and Spanish Andalusian), Somali and Middle Eastern music. Construction of the oud is similar to that of the lute. The modern oud and the European lute both descend from a common ancestor via diverging paths. One instrument that has been suggested as ancestral is the Barbat. The oud is readily distinguished from the lute by its lack of frets and smaller neck. Alongside the lute, it is considered an ancestor of the guitar.
The origin of the name oud (and its etymological cousin, lute) for the musical instrument is uncertain. The Arabic: العود (al-ʿūd) literally denotes a thin piece of wood similar to the shape of a straw. It may refer to the wooden plectrum traditionally used for playing the oud, to the thin strips of wood used for the back, or to the wooden soundboard that distinguished it from similar instruments with skin-faced bodies.
UD may refer to:
The cuneiform ud sign, also ut, and with numerous other syllabic uses, as well as multiple sumerogramic uses is a common sign for the mid 14th-century BC Amarna letters and the Epic of Gilgamesh. The sign is constructed upon the single vertical stroke , with various positionings of two wedge-strokes
at the left, sometimes approximately centered, or often inscribed upwards to the left, the second wedge-stroke (or 'angled line-stroke'), occasionally inscribed/ligatured upon the first. The wedge-strokes can have any size, are often smaller than the vertical, but as an example, Amarna letter EA 256, can be almost as large as the vertical.
In the Epic of Gilgamesh, sign ud is listed as used for the following linguistic elements:
Sumerograms
The usage numbers for each linguistic element in the Epic of Gilgamesh are as follows:lah--(2), par--(5), pir--(4), tam--(32), tú--(46), ud--(30), ut--(95), uṭ-(7), BABBAR-(1), UD-(75), UTU-(58).